


The Code of Chuck

by maskedfangirl



Series: Chuck 'Verse [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Canon, Bromance, Drinking Games, Fallen!Castiel, Humor, M/M, Pillow & Blanket Forts, Road Trips, Sacrilege, Sing-alongs, awkward spooning, gratuitous Iron Man references, we'll stay up late swapping manly stories and in the morning Missouri's making waffles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-05
Updated: 2012-09-24
Packaged: 2017-11-14 22:39:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/520251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maskedfangirl/pseuds/maskedfangirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Looking to take on the devil, the Winchesters, Castiel, and Chuck embark on a road trip to Lawrence, Kansas, where an old friend might be able to help Chuck figure out this whole prophet thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Two quick notes - one serious, one less so:
> 
> 1\. If Biblical figures being used in fan fiction bother you, proceed with caution through books 2 and 3 in the 'verse. I'm an Agnostic playing in the Christian Armageddon sandbox, and I tried to be respectful, but I understand that sacrilege via fanfic is not everybody's cup of tea. 
> 
> 2\. KFC does not serve curly fries. I could have sworn they did. I found out they did not when a reader told me she'd driven all over town looking for a KFC that sold curly fries thanks to this fic. I'm sorry. Let's just call this apocrypha.

Chuck had been subjected to a lot of different kinds of awkward silence in his time. There were the standard issue conversation pauses, the “So you’re the one who’s dating my daughter” glaring fun times, and his mother’s favorite, the chilly silence that came whenever Chuck mentioned his career writing “those trashy books.” Hell, he’d even survived the silence of impending doom with a side of “Don’t touch my shoulder,” back when the archangel tore Castiel’s grace out in his living room. But nothing Chuck had experienced compared to the immutable, deadly silence in the Impala at this particular moment.  
  
Dean stared out from the driver’s seat as he pulled up in Bobby’s driveway, his face stony and his knuckles clenched at the wheel. Chuck buried himself as best he could in the passenger seat, waiting - hoping - that someone would say something before his ears started to ring. No one dared break this silence, though.  
  
Not until Dean parked between Bobby’s muscle car and Chuck’s station wagon.  
  
“I think both versions of the song have their merits,” Castiel offered from the backseat.   
  
“No,” Dean growled, pulling himself out of the car and turning just long enough to glare at the dissenter. “One is a classic that helped shape my childhood, and one—” here he shot eye-daggers at Chuck “—turns that beautiful thing into a treatise on freaking bestiality!” He slammed the door, but even so Chuck could hear plain as day when he yelled, “Get your heathen ass out of my car, prophet, and don’t plan on touching it again!”  
  
“Is—is he serious?” Chuck asked.  
  
Castiel sighed. “His brother and his musical canon are the only things Dean holds sacred.”  
  
That wasn’t true, Chuck wanted to say. There was also Castiel. He ran a hand down across his mouth. “Crap. Do you think it’d help my case if I told him the Weird Al version of ‘Dirty Deeds’ is the only one I know?”  
  
“No,” Castiel said. “If anything, it would hurt.”  
  
Double crap. Well, at least the drive hadn’t been a total bust. Chuck eyed the sigils Dean had grudgingly let Sam paint on the inside of the Impala’s roof. They were ancient something-or-other cloaking symbols Bobby had found in a book, drawn in a mix of blood, paint, and blessed oils that made the car smell sort of like the inside of a KFC.   
  
Mmm, KFC. God, it had been forever since Chuck had eaten something deep fried and pre-packaged for the drive-through. Bobby’s cooking was fine and all, but they’d been living off the Y2K-esque dry goods stash in the pantry for weeks now, and Chuck had started having daydreams about non-staple foods. Chocolate cake. Cheez-Its. Whoppers. Curly fries.  
  
Oh dear merciful Christ in whatever was left of Heaven,  _curly fries_.   
  
Anyway. Point was, the KFC sigils must be working, because in two hours of driving they hadn’t been stopped once by any of the angels or demons the hunter grapevine said were crowding up South Dakota. And if the sigils were working, that meant no more being cooped up at Bobby’s with three testy hunters, playing roommates in the panic room with—  
  
“Cas!” Dean barked from the porch.  
  
Passing chuck a wry look, Castiel opened his door. They both stepped out of the car, and the former angel said under his breath, “Humor him, Chuck. Dean has a lot to deal with right now.”  
  
“Right,” Chuck said, a little bitterly. “Because he’s the only one of us with stuff on his mind.”  
  
Castiel frowned back at him. “You know what I mean.”  
  
Yeah, yeah. Dean was the leader. Still. Chuck was the one who’d died a few weeks back and woken up to find his entire system of prophetic visions had “evolved” into a new and confusing form. Dean had to lead the troops into battle at the end of the world, but Chuck was the one who had to figure out how to see the battle ahead of time well enough to save the day, keep everyone safe, and manage to do it all without getting himself caught by the dickheads upstairs who wanted to poke his prophetic little brain for strategy hints. Not that they’d get much out of him, anyway. He barely got anything out of himself these days.  
  
“We’ll figure out your visions,” Castiel said without a word from him - obviously they’d been spending too much time together. Chuck shrugged, not meeting his eyes, and Castiel raised a fist toward him. “Hit this,” he intoned sternly.   
  
Chuck heaved a sigh and gave Castiel a fist bump. Against his will, he felt a smile starting to form on his lips. “Stark.”  
  
“Rhodey,” Castiel answered dutifully. “Prophet practice this afternoon?”  
  
“After geek time with Sam and Bobby. Sam thinks we can extend the bounds of the sigils beyond the cars.” Chuck looked up at Bobby’s ramshackle house as they walked toward the porch. He’d be happy to delay prophet practice indefinitely and regress to the kind of writing he was doing back before this whole  _Supernatural_  prophet of the Lord crap had started. Indie comic scripts. Half-finished scifi novels about sexy inventors and spaceship captains.  _X-Men_  fan fiction. (Jean Grey/Storm? Totally canon.) But those carefree writing days were gone along with the Mountain Dew tolerance that had made them possible, and if he didn’t embrace this new kind of visions and lead the Scooby gang out of Casa de Singer, they’d all be stuck in this stasis forever.   
  
Chuck rubbed the back of his neck, where his Holy Crap I Died knot was still tight as ever, and followed Castiel into the house.  
  
  
***  
  
 _Castiel stretched out, peeling away his shirt as he—_  
  
No.  
  
 _“You’re so hot when you enunciate,” Dean purred into the former angel’s ear, his breath warm and his hands even warmer on Castiel’s—_  
  
Um, yeah, no.  
  
 _“Dean,” Castiel hissed like a curse, his fingers curling into the hunter’s hair as a welcome mouth worked at his—_  
  
“Any luck?” Castiel asked from the other cot.   
  
“Augh!” Chuck said, slamming his pen down and wheeling around in his chair. Castiel and Dean sat in the opposite cot, Castiel looking at him encouragingly and Dean leaning back against the panic room wall with a battered Anthony Burgess paperback, not paying either of them much attention. Chuck had been trying to write something deep and prophety for half an hour now, on Castiel’s suggestion of “Focus on my future,” but all he’d gotten was shmoop, stolen glances, and—well, the stuff of Gambit/Wolverine fic, which he’d read a few times, but that was during an experimental phase in college that was between him and his Usenet group.  
  
“N-no,” Chuck answered. “No luck. I think Dean’s…interfering.”   
  
“Interfering?” Dean said, eyeing Chuck over the cover of the novel. “With what?”  
  
“I don’t know! My receptiveness to the holy word? My Chi? Who knows how this works!”  
  
“As an evolved conduit for the word of the Lord, you should be able to direct your inner eye toward a subject,” Castiel offered helpfully. “Just concentrate on me, and my future should come to you.”  
  
Chuck concentrated. He screwed up his face and clenched his hands, trying to focus on his friend. But Dean kept butting into his mind, and that only led to The Castiel and Dean Happy Hour, which he was so not going to present to the hunters as part of the plan.   
  
“I don’t think it works that way,” he said, shaking his head. “My visions have always been tied so strongly to my writing, and writing—you can’t force it like that. Sometimes it stops, sometimes it flows, and you’ve just gotta let it take you.”   
  
“God, writing is the laziest profession,” Dean muttered, burying his nose in the Anthony Burgess.   
  
A knock echoed through the panic room, and Sam peeked his head inside with a call of “Hey guys, dinner’s up.”  
  
“Awesome,” Dean said, abandoning Burgess on the cot. Sam had a whole tray full of sandwiches, and while it was closer to elementary school cafeteria dining than four star restaurant, it was food. Chuck grabbed himself half a sandwich and nibbled it idly, his stomach knotting from the pressure of the practice session. Dean grabbed food for Castiel first, then himself, and sat back on the cot with him to eat. Castiel took one bite of the dry turkey, frowned, and excused himself from the room to get a drink of water.  
  
Sam set the tray of sandwiches down on the table beside Castiel’s bed, his stiff posture reminding Chuck of Alfred the butler. Would that make Dean Batman? Dean would be pretty psyched about that. “Hey, man, I gotta ask - what’s with you lately?” Sam said, frowning at his big brother as he straightened up. “You’re always down here with Cas. I mean, when we first got here, you were following the guy around like a—like—”   
  
“A giant mother hen in an old henley?” Chuck offered.  
  
“Exactly,” Sam said, shrugging. “But it’s gotten more pronounced lately. I hardly ever see you unless he’s in the room, too.”  
  
Ohhhhhhh. Well, this was gonna be fun. Chuck bit back a smile, resting his cheek on his hand.   
  
“Bobby didn’t tell you?” Dean said, looking up at his brother with the kind of shock usually reserved for sixth graders assigned an unexpected essay on the American Revolution.  
  
“Tell me what?” Sam said, doing a face that Chuck could only describe as I Can Haz Whole Story PLZ? face. Chuck needed to spend less time looking up cat macros on the internet, he decided. Cat macros were not conducive to good writing or internal narrative.  
  
Dean made quite a production of moving his lips without any noise, clearly going over multiple intros to the topic in his head. Finally, he shook his head, gave Sam a shrug, and said, “Me and Cas…we’re together.”   
  
Sam’s brow lowered. “What, you mean…together together?”  
  
“Yeah.”   
  
“You do know he’s a guy, right?”  
  
“Doesn’t seem to matter.”   
  
“Well, that’s just…” Sam trailed off, leaning hard against the wall and pulling a face that Chuck couldn’t find a LOL caption for.   
  
“Sick?” Dean ventured, looking it himself a little.  
  
“No.” Sam crossed his arms, watching his brother deflate as the idea of getting disowned got yanked off the menu. “It’s just…out of character.”   
  
“No, it’s not,” Chuck piped up. “Actually, it’s pretty in character for Dean. You just never saw him with a guy because you were off at Stanford, or busy studying in the library, or zonked out on cough syrup in the next bed.”  
  
“DUDE,” Dean said, shooting him an I Can Haz Vengeance Nao look.   
  
Chuck smiled back at him pleasantly. “Y’know, I had a comic deal for Supernatural: Origins on the table when my publisher went bankrupt. Even if it had gone through, I don’t know if I could’ve written it believably. You had the most debauched childhood.”   
  
“Cough syrup?” Sam said, and then his brow flattened and his eyes went wide. “Superior? When I was twelve? Dean, I had pneumonia!”  
  
Dean glared at Chuck. “I’m gonna murder you.”  
  
“Archangel,” Chuck grinned smugly, pointing upward.   
  
“Screw the archangel. I’m gonna murder you twice.”  
  
“Why is there murder?” Castiel asked, frowning as he walked back into the room with his drink. Sam’s wide eyes followed him as he took a seat on his cot next to Dean, and he returned the gaze curiously.   
  
Sam took a step toward the door, paused, and said to Castiel, “You hurt him and I’ll kill you.” Then he retreated out of the room so fast Chuck imagined little smoke trails following his shoes.   
  
“Oh, you told him!” Castiel said, clapping Dean on the shoulder. “Good for you.”  
  
“For the record,” Chuck said to Dean, “you hurt him and I’ll kill you, too.”   
  
Dean dropped his face into his hands, smothering a noise somewhere between a growl and a whimper.   
  
Castiel narrowed his eyes, the corners of his lips creeping upward. “That’s the kindest murderous sentiment anyone’s ever expressed on my behalf. You’re a true friend, Chuck.”   
  
“Well, I try.”   
  
“I hate you both,” Dean muttered into his hands.  
  
“No, you don’t,” Chuck said helpfully. “You have mixed, secretly positive feelings toward me, and you care about Castiel more than you can say in man-speak.”  
  
“Shut up, Chuck.”  
  
  
***  
  
It was, apparently, a “Shut up, Chuck” kind of week. Not that most weeks weren’t, but this one in particular. Bobby always seemed to be right behind him whenever Chuck said something idjit-like, Sam was beginning to lose patience with his lack of prophetic mojo, which most of his anti-apocalypse plans seemed to hinge on, and Dean—well. Dean was Dean. And Dean was  _extra_  Deanish lately, with the tension that seemed to have risen between him and Sam.   
  
They didn’t talk about it in the open, but Chuck saw the two of them talking in hushed tones on the porch while he was watching Bobby’s old Tarzan movies in the living room. One or the other always stormed out before they were through, and Chuck felt the unfinished conversations strung between them like a tripwire when they were around the rest of the group.   
  
And he worried. Was Sam upset about the Dean and Castiel thing? It wouldn’t be like him to get his giant man panties twisted over something like his brother liking dudes, but maybe the fact that Dean kept it from him? Or the fact that this time he happened to have fallen for a fallen angel, which could complicate things? Chuck watched their faces through the window, coming up with plots and motivations and wishing his characters—er, friends—would stop being so troublesome.   
  
Castiel didn’t seem concerned. But then, he was really into those freaking Tarzan movies.   
  
  
***  
  
The flaming hail came on a Tuesday. At least, Chuck was pretty sure it was a Tuesday - time at Bobby’s passed in such a muddle of research and heroism talk that he could only tell what day of the week it was by the calendar on Sam’s laptop, and Sam was using it to look up some ritual or other (although Chuck had started to suspect that “looking up the ritual” was a euphemism), so he couldn’t be sure. But it was either a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Probably.  
  
Anyway, there was hail.  
  
Flaming hail.  
  
Falling from the sky.   
  
Anybody’d have trouble remembering what day it is under those particular circumstances, especially if they happened to be out stripping iron parts from old cars in a scrapyard. Chuck, Dean, and Castiel were doing just that when the sky opened up and the first chunks of hail hit the ground.   
  
“What the—” Dean started, but was interrupted by Castiel yelling, “Run!”  
  
Hail rained down on the scrapyard, turning it into a chorus of  _tinks_  and  _clunks_  so loud that Chuck thought this must be what it was like on the inside of a steel drum. Flames licked by, hissing as they hit the ground and sparking as they struck metal. The bumper of a rusted Chevy crashed down on Chuck’s left, and he took off with a yelp, running toward the after Castiel and Dean.   
  
They ducked along the sides of stacked scrap metal, looking up toward the sky, and for the first time since he was eight years old, Chuck really really  _really_  wished he had one of those padded firefighter helmets. Dean gave a shout and waved a hand, and he and Castiel followed, sprinting the open door of a shed near where the cars were parked.   
  
Chuck pressed himself up against the inner wall of the shed, trying to regain his breath and also trying not to think about the visions he’d had of Dean and Castiel pressing up against the same wall. The hail thundering against the tin roof drowned out the thought pretty easily.  
  
“What the hell was that?” Dean said, wincing as he looked out the doorway and then turning away. “Oh, god. It’s—I can’t watch this. I’m sorry, baby.”  
  
Chuck peered around the corner. Flaming hail was bouncing merrily off the Impala. He could barely hear the shattering glass as something struck the hood, because the noise against the roof of the shed was so raucous. He swallowed. His own station wagon was out there in the storm, too, and as old as it was, he didn’t like to think of it getting—  
  
Something caught his attention. “Guys.”  
  
“Revelation 8:7,” Castiel said, turning into an audiobook. “‘The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.’”  
  
“I don’t see any blood,” Dean pointed out. “And isn’t it a little early for the trumpeting? I thought we were still at the waiting for horsemen stage.”  
  
“Much of the Bible is flawed, having passed through men on the way to the page. Men are prone to allegory, drama, hallucinations, poor listening skills—”  
  
“Guys!” Chuck said louder. They both looked, and he pointed at a five gallon tank in the driveway, wide-eyed. “Are we gonna be concerned about the big tank of gasoline sitting out by the cars?”  
  
“Oh, crap,” Dean spat.  
  
“A single gallon of gas is equal to fourteen sticks of TNT when it’s hit with a sudden charge,” Chuck said, and frowned. “I saw it on—what was it? Some fake science show that’s really about explosions.  _Time Warp?_  No.”  
  
“ _MythBusters?_ ” Dean offered.  
  
“You watch  _MythBusters?_ ”  
  
“No,” Dean said, a little defensively.  
  
It was then that they both noticed that Castiel was no longer with them.  
  
“Cas!” they yelled out the doorway.  
  
Castiel was sprinting across the driveway toward the gas tank, moving faster than Chuck had seen him go since he’d lost his teleportation shtick. He went around the Impala in an arc, then suddenly fell out of sight. Dean lurched forward, but Chuck caught his arm to keep him from running out into the storm.   
  
A few seconds later, there was Castiel, back on his feet and scrambling for the gas tank. He lurched back to the shed a little slower but made it inside in record time.  
  
“You’re an idiot,” Dean said, grabbing his cheeks to kiss him. “You okay?”  
  
“Fine,” Castiel answered, flinching as he dropped the gas tank. At least a few gallons sloshed inside - enough, Chuck thought, for an explosion that would’ve made the  _MythBusters_  team proud.   
  
“Next time, make it a point not to run toward the potential explosives, okay, Cas?”   
  
“Next time, don’t leave the gas out.”  
  
“If a certain prophet had  _told_  me it was gonna be cloudy with a chance of fireballs, I wouldn’t have,” Dean said, giving Chuck the stink eye.  
  
Chuck’s shoulders retracted to near his ears. “I didn’t know, okay? If I’d’ve known, you’d’ve known!”  
  
"You gonna tell me you didn't see that coming?"  
  
"No," Chuck answered. "I mean, I see a lot of things and people, uh, coming. But the powers that be don’t make it easy, y'know?" It was an annoying trait he'd noticed since he'd gone all Gandalf the White - his visions no longer gave him headaches, but they also didn't give him the whole story. It was like writing an actual novel, nowadays - he had to brainstorm and seek out the next scene, if he could even find it at all. This process involved…well, thinking. Chuck hated it.  
  
"Hold up a sec," Dean said, tossing his hand out to block the doorway, as if Chuck were about to escape out into the flaming, sulfur reeking death beyond. "'People'? You been spying on me and Cas since you got re-animated?"  
  
Chuck snorted and shook his head. "No! No, that'd be--I mean, I wouldn't look for--"  
  
"Look me in the eye, Chuck! You been taking a psychic peek at my junk?"  
  
Chuck's attention snapped forward, and he bit his lip as Dean Winchester stared suspiciously at him. The guy outweighed him by at least fifty pounds, and he could probably lift him and toss him ass over teakettle into the apocalyptic storm outside without much effort.  
  
"I, uh..." Chuck swallowed. "Look, I ask the powers that be to get a glimpse of Castiel's future, and they give me money shots! That is so not my fault! If anything, that's your fault for going at it so much."  
  
Dean blew out through his nose, scowling. "Drop your pants."  
  
"What?"  
  
"You heard me. Fair's fair. You've seen mine, I get to see yours."  
  
“I really don’t think this is the time or place for—”  
  
“Drop trou, Chuck, or I’ll—”  
  
“Dean,” Castiel interjected. Well, less interjected and more whispered as he crumpled against the wall with his eyelids fluttering, but it ended the discussion about pants dropping nonetheless.  
  
“Woah, woah, woah,” Dean said, catching Castiel by the armpits as he slumped and easing him to the ground. “Cas? Cas, hey, buddy, c’mon, look at me!” He reached around Castiel’s head to support it, then drew back his fingers. They were dark with blood. Chuck dropped to the ground next to the men and pulled off his hoodie for Dean to press against the wound.  
  
“I’m fine,” Castiel said, one hand pushing ineffectively at Dean’s chest. “Leave it be, Dean. God’s grace will help me to heal it in just—just a minute…”  
  
***  
  
Two hours after the hail had started, it was down to a trickle, with just the occasional smoldering hail pellet bouncing off the roof of Bobby’s house. No one inside even flinched at the sounds anymore. Bobby had cleaned up the glass from a few broken windows while Sam stitched up the back of Castiel’s head, and now he sat at the kitchen table with a fifth of whiskey and a leather-bound copy of the Bible, rubbing his temples and periodically swearing under his breath. The rest of Winchesters & Company had camped out in the living room around Castiel, who was propped up in the most uncomfortable chair in the house to try and keep him awake. Sam and Dean had seen so many gushing head wound and concussion double features in their time that it was run of the mill, but Chuck never had, and he couldn’t stop his right leg from tapping and jumping with nerves. He and Sam had taken on the task of keeping Castiel alert and distracted while Dean watched from the doorway, a beer in one hand and a vague look of concern written on his face.  
  
“Okay, so, they run out of the Fire Swamp and straight into Prince Humperdinck’s men,” Chuck narrated, scrolling down the script that was displayed on Sam’s laptop screen. “Now, we need a Count Rugen. Dean?”  
  
“No,” Dean said into his beer.  
  
“Or Bobby—”  
  
“Not on yer life,” came the answer from the kitchen.   
  
“It’s gotta be you, then, Sam.”  
  
“What? Why me? I’m already Humperdinck! How come I have to play all the bad guys?”  
  
“Because I’m already Inigo, so I can’t be Rugen, or the sword fight between them will be super weird. And besides, you’re good at being the bad guy.” Watching Sam’s mouth go thin, he amended, “I mean, you’ve got subtlety. No one would believe me as a villain.”  
  
“Castiel could do it.”  
  
“Castiel can barely handle Buttercup right now.”   
  
Castiel didn’t seem to hear them. He was studying the same three fingernails he’d been studying since his character had caught fire last scene.   
  
Dean downed the dregs of his beer and pointed the bottle at his brother. “Can I talk to you in private, Princess Bride?”  
  
Sam eased himself up off the couch and followed his brother out onto the porch. Their voices started up before the door closed, but Chuck couldn’t hear what they were saying.  
  
“They’re talking about me,” Castiel said, angling his head toward the door. His voice was quiet, almost conspiratorial - an adjective that Chuck had used dozens of times but never really experienced before. “They’re saying I’m broken. Because I can’t—” He tapped his head, then his hand lowered to the center of his chest, where his grace had been ripped out. The healed-over flesh made a solid noise when his fist hit it, but his expression was hollow. “Because it’s missing. I was an angel, I was crackling with power and eager to help. Too eager. Now I’m…” He frowned in the laptop’s direction. “The damsel in distress.”   
  
“No, you’re not. You’re just a little concussed is all. You’ll be back to brainstorming with the Scooby gang in a couple of days.”  
  
“Dean wants to save me,” Castiel said, giving Chuck a very serious look. “He can’t. I’m held together by the same decaying matter as everything else now. And it hurts, Chuck. The lack. The hole in the center of me. My proximity to what’s left of my grace in Dean has helped, but nothing will restore…” He trailed off, tipping his head sideways as he examined something in the distance. “I would love to devour something blue right now. Do we have any blue food?”  
  
“Um, I don’t know,” Chuck said, getting up. “I’ll check the pantry.”  
  
There was no blue food in the house. Chuck did his best to hold Castiel's attention by introducing him to cat macros on the internet, but much of the humor seemed lost on him. After about five pages of LOLcats, Sam and Dean returned from the porch.   
  
“Family meeting!” Dean called. Once he had everyone’s attention, he eyed the group, ending with Castiel, and said, “It’s obvious that staying here does us more harm than good. No offense to Bobby’s hospitality, but I think it’s time we get the hell out of here and start working on the whole end of the world thing.”  
  
“Seconding that,” Bobby said.   
  
“Dean and I have been talking stuff over for a while now,” Sam said, “and we’ve got a plan. Chuck?”  
  
Chuck stiffened at the mention of his name and  _plan_  so close together, his heart plunging down to his toes. “Um. Yeah?”  
  
Dean smirked. “How would you feel about a road trip?”  
  
“Where to?” Chuck asked.  
  
Dean’s smirk grew into a grin. “Missouri.”  



	2. Chapter 2

It took a surprisingly short time for Chuck to pack. A shorter time, actually, than the “Who’s on first?” conversation it had taken to establish that the Missouri they were bound to visit was not the state Missouri but the psychic Missouri living in Lawrence, Kansas. (And while the psychic Missouri might be sunny this time of year, Dean didn’t think there were any KFCs in her. Once Chuck had figured out his mistake, he’d tried to make a joke about how, hey, wasn’t Kansas also, like, a band or something? At which point Dean issued a head-whupping that would’ve made Special Agent Gibbs proud and Chuck decided to shut up and pack his things.)   
  
“Physical contact,” Castiel observed, “means he likes you.”  
  
“Right,” Chuck said. “Because nobody ever touches anybody they intend to strangle.”  
  
But evidently Dean didn’t intend to strangle him, because the morning they left Bobby’s, he assigned Castiel to ride in Chuck’s beat up station wagon while he and Sam kept to their usual ride. Chuck’s poor car. Aside from the decades of wear and tear, Castiel’s blood stain in the backseat, the hail craters all across the exterior, and the unexplained cottage cheese-like streak on the back of the driver’s seat, the car’s ceiling was now painted with the same sigils as the Impala. The KFC scent of the sigils clashed with the sour odor of the hex bag in the glove compartment and the coppery, probably-blood smell coming from the pouches of two +5 amulets of protection that Sam had made them. While Castiel and Sam hauled provisions out from the house, Dean leaned in the driver’s side window of the station wagon, orienting Chuck on the itinerary. The amulet pouch hung from his neck, swaying in the breeze next to the amulet Sam had given him as a kid. Chuck was suddenly acutely aware of the fact that his publisher had briefly sold replicas of that amulet for $14.95.  
  
“Keep the protective amulets around your necks at all times, and if you get a hinky feeling, trust your gut and get back in the car where you’re safest. Use the CB to touch base with us.” Dean pointed to the unit on the dashboard. “Both sides know our cell numbers, but they won’t expect this, and Bobby figured out a way to protect our frequency.”  
  
“Do we get code names?” Chuck asked, his eyes lighting up. “I’ve always wanted to do the CB radio thing with code names.”  
  
“Uh,” Dean said, his lip curling. “Yeah, sure. Anyway, stick to the route we planned out. Put up sigils anyplace you stop for more than an hour. If we get separated, you two go on to Missouri’s and we’ll all meet up there. And keep the potty breaks to a minimum.”  
  
“Not a problem.”  
  
“Not for you. Cas is still kinda figuring out this whole bladder-having thing.” The way Dean smiled made the idea of a pee-happy former angel seem almost endearing.   
  
“Ah,” Chuck said.   
  
“Look,” Dean said, his voice dropping low. He curled both arms over the window’s edge and looked Chuck straight in the eyes. “I need you to do something for me. It’s important.”  
  
“Name it.”  
  
Dean licked his lips and glanced back toward the house, where Castiel was just exiting with a pair of duffel bags. “Promise me you won’t let him pull any thrilling heroics. No matter what happens. Keep him safe on the sidelines while I’m not around.”  
  
Chuck frowned. He’d never been charged with a mission before. “I promise,” he said seriously.   
  
Dean’s face relaxed. Pulling away from the station wagon, he patted its side like it was an old horse that just needed a bit of encouragement. “All right, girls!” he called back towards the house. “Say your tearful goodbyes and bring your milkshakes out to the yard!”  
  
Saying goodbye to Bobby involved a lot of stern looks and gruff utterances and a couple of glares in Chuck’s general direction. It reminded him, not unpleasantly, of holidays with his parents. And then they were off, a two-car caravan rambling down the long dirt road.  
  
*  
  
A few hours into the drive, Chuck was sick of three things he never thought he’d be sick of:  
  
1\. Ace of Base. They’d played  _The Bridge_  enough times that Chuck was pretty sure the chorus of “Edge of Heaven” would be running through his head even post-mortem. Castiel had stopped singing along half an hour ago, too, but that may have had more to do with Dean hearing them over the CB than it had to do with his love for the band.  
  
2\. The back of the Impala. They’d been staring at it from exactly three car lengths behind since they’d gotten on the interstate, and the Winchesters’ license plate digits might be joining “Edge of Heaven” as permanent debris in Chuck’s brain.  
  
3\. Buttes. After passing a hundred or so of them, the name just wasn’t funny anymore.   
  
Castiel was still fascinated by buttes - except for a reason that involved something about “the miracle of God’s creation” instead of ass jokes - and he slouched against the window, his eyes staring dreamily out over the landscape. His travel ensemble was a pair of Dean’s ripped jeans that were slightly too big on him and an ancient Bad Religion t-shirt with nuns kissing on the front of it. Between that and the slight spaciness that was still fading post-concussion, he reminded Chuck more of one of his old stoner buddies from college than a former angel of the Lord.  
  
“My stomach rumbles,” Castiel declared at the window.  
  
Ah, there was the angel. “I’m sure we can do something about that,” Chuck said, checking the next road sign as they approached it. There were restaurants at the next turnoff. And stores. One name in particular made him grin. He grabbed the mic from the CB radio and held down the button on it, transmitting on the agreed upon frequency.   
  
“How ‘bout ya, Batman? Got your ears on?”  
  
No answer- just a crackle of static on the other end. He saw the silhouette of the driver in the Impala glance down and then pointedly back at the road.   
  
“Come back, Batman,” he said into the mic again. “This is War Machine making a request for the convoy.” Still no answer. Dean had been doing this ever since he’d heard his main squeeze singing along to pop-synth. Chuck shook his head. “Batgirl, how ‘bout ya?”  
  
The CB’s crackle turned to a soft hum of classic rock and Sam’s tired voice. “You don’t have to use trucker slang. We’ve got this frequency protected.”  
  
“But I read the whole Wikipedia article.”  
  
A sigh. “This had better not be another 10-100.”  
  
Chuck held the mic up to his mouth. “That’s a negatory, good neighbor. Iron Man’s bladder is doing just fine.” Castiel shot him an annoyed look. “We’d like to take a breather two miles up - grab some food and hit the Goodwill.”  
  
“The Goodwill?” Sam repeated. “A shopping spree isn’t on the itinerary.”  
  
Sam would know. He’d planned out the whole itinerary, including footnotes and a list of lore books cited, and instructed them to tape it to the dash next to the CB.  
  
“It’ll only take a minute,” Chuck said. “We need some new tunes.”  
  
“Damn right you do,” said a more distant voice over the other end. “Come on, Batgirl, we can afford one stop.”  
  
The radio crackled into silence, and then the Impala took the turn-off in front of them. Chuck, gleefully, followed.   
  
“I disapprove of the Marvel/DC mashup our party has going,” Castiel said to the sigil on the ceiling. “It would never happen canonically, characters from Batman and Ironman teaming up. And why is Sam Batgirl? He should be Robin.”  
  
“Because he’s a girl, obviously,” Chuck answered. “And y’know, Batman/Ironman slash exists. So you and Dean works.”  
  
“I suppose,” Castiel conceded.  
  
They parked the cars side by side in the lot of a small shopping center, right between the Goodwill and the KFC.  
  
CURLY FRIES, shouted Chuck’s brain. Taking a five dollar bill out of his wallet, he passed it to Castiel. “Tell you what - you go grab some random tapes from the used music section of the Goodwill and meet me at the KFC. I’ll get us food and a booth.”  
  
The mission was simple enough for Castiel - much easier to handle, certainly, than choosing flavoring, breading, size, and bone content of chicken. He started off across the parking lot immediately, and Dean hopped out of the Impala and jogged after him. Chuck tapped on Sam’s window when the guy didn’t get out. “You coming?”   
  
“I don’t think so,” Sam said, giving his head a tense little shake. “I’m more of a salad eater.”  
  
“Ah.” Of course. Chuck remembered all the times he’d written diner scenes between the Winchesters, and how awful Sam felt when he choked down the rare fried something-or-other. The guy looked like he was racked with food guilt just thinking about it now. Giving him a nod and a smile, Chuck left the cars in the lot.   
  
The KFC was nearly deserted this time of day, just one bored looking teenage girl manning the register and an older couple doing crosswords over biscuits in the far corner. Chuck surveyed the menu, ordered for himself and Castiel - extra curly fries in case Dean was hungry, too - and stood awkwardly at the counter, waiting for his order. This was, he realized, the first time he’d been in a public space under some pretense of normalcy since before Lucifer was released. The last time he’d eaten fast food had been at McDonald’s with the newly-fallen Castiel, all grace talk and quiet pain, and before that…well, honestly, he couldn’t remember. Now, here he was, just Chuck - just some guy in an oversized plaid shirt, for Christ’s sake! - waiting for a bag full of heart attack fodder.  
  
Except…he wasn’t. Not the waiting for heart attack fodder part, because he would be totally thrilled at the prospect of dying with the Colonel’s original recipe clogging his ventricles - but he wasn’t just some guy. It didn’t show on the outside. In the restaurant’s security camera monitor overhead, he just looked like a small, nervous guy with a bit too much beard. The monitor didn’t say “Prophet of the Lord” or “On a Mission…Quest…Thing” or “Newly Remade by an Archangel” under his image. The last one, somehow, was the heaviest weight. And nobody outside his insular little group knew about it. Chuck hugged his middle, leaning into the counter.  
  
“I died,” he said to the girl behind the register. “A few weeks back.”  
  
The teenager gave him the utterly empty-headed look of a chewing cow for a few seconds. Then, she said, “My cousin died once. He fell into a frozen lake and his heart stopped for six minutes.”  
  
Chuck nodded, scratching behind his ear. “This dickface angel who was sorta orchestrating the apocalypse ran me through with a sword, and then an archangel smote him and brought me back to life, because apparently I’m Heaven’s butt monkey.”   
  
The girl’s mouth hinged open, exposing a lump of mint gum.  
  
“Yeah, so,” Chuck said, putting on what he hoped was a nonthreatening smile, “being alive. Weird, huh? Hey, do the honey packets come in the bag, or what?”  
  
Castiel came into the restaurant before the girl could answer him. That was okay - he wasn’t married to the idea of honey, and the conversation had loosened his Holy Crap I Died knot a little. They took their food to a booth in the sunlight, where Chuck divvied up the curly fries and Castiel dumped out a plastic bag full of cassette tapes.   
  
“No Dean?” Chuck asked.  
  
“No,” Castiel said, and frowned at his food. “These fried potatoes appear to be defective.”  
  
“Only in that they make the other fries cry from inferiority. Partake and rejoice.” Chuck ran his fingers across the tapes, reading labels as he ate. “Ricky Nelson…Greatest Novelty Hits…Raffi live in concert with the Sunshine Band…Geto Boys…oh, hey, The Proclaimers!”  
  
“Something is off,” Castiel said.  
  
“I’ll say. Somebody gave their filk music to the Goodwill. And you picked up all of it, looks like. Have you even heard of the  _Last Herald Mage_  trilogy?” Chuck looked up. Castiel was staring at him with an intent look he hadn’t seen in weeks. “What?”  
  
Castiel’s voice lowered. “Dean didn’t say a thing about the tapes I picked. I’m certain there must have been something he would approve of in that bin, but he made no effort to find it and force it on me. He just…stood by. Quietly.”  
  
“Dean…quiet?”  
  
“And as we were leaving the store, before he went back to the Impala, he leaned over and kissed my brow.”  
  
“In public? Where people are?”  
  
“Yes.”   
  
Chuck shoveled their meal back into the bag and started toward the door. Castiel followed after him, tentatively biting into a curly fry. The late summer wind hit them as they stepped out onto the parking lot, and so did an awful realization: the Impala was gone. Chuck blinked and scanned the lot to be sure he wasn’t looking at the wrong hail dented station wagon, but no, there was the Chuckmobile, sitting all by itself. The two of them sprinted to the car, and Chuck was on the CB before he could find a place for the fast food.   
  
“Batman, Batman, how ‘bout ya?” Silence. “Come back, Batman. Batgirl, anyone.” Nothing. “Dean, goddammit, answer me! Where are you?”  
  
Finally, the CB crackled. “War Machine, Iron Man, I hear ya,” said Dean’s voice on the other end. “We gotta take a detour, get some stuff done. Go on without us.”  
  
“Detour? What do you mean, ‘detour’?”  
  
Castiel grabbed the mic. “Dean, what are you doing that you don’t want us involved in?”  
  
“Don’t get your wings in a twist. We’ll meet you at the destination in a week at most. Keep yourselves safe and don’t do anything stupid. Over and out.”  
  
“Dean? Dean!” Castiel let go of the button. The radio fell silent.  
  
Chuck stared at it, his mouth hanging open. “Those bastards ditched us.”  
  
***  
  
“It’s probably just a routine hunt,” Chuck said fifteen miles later, grabbing the last curly fry from the bag. “They’re hunters, and they’ve been cooped up for weeks, y’know? They’re probably just raring to research and exorcise something.”  
  
“But why would they not want us along for that?”   
  
“Because,” Chuck said, frowning, “we are delicate flowers.”  
  
“I am not a delicate flower,” Castiel said, sipping at his blue raspberry Icee. They’d had to stop at a gas station after KFC because his concussed brain demanded a blue drink, and now his lips were an oxygen deprived looking shade.  
  
Chuck chose not to respond to that. From the speakers, Raffi preached the joys of bathtime.  
  
Castiel’s eyes roamed the lines of buildings just off the highway. “Regardless, if they’re going to take a detour to satisfy their own interests, so am I. Turn right here.”  
  
Chuck took the turn. “Where are we going?”  
  
“Another right, then pull into the parking lot on the left.”  
  
Chuck followed directions, his foot easing up on the gas when he realized the lot he was pulling into was attached to a Planned Parenthood with a small bevy of protesters hoisting signs out front. “Uh, dude?”  
  
“I have questions to ask regarding sexual intercourse, and their website says their counselors are available to answer questions,” Castiel replied, unhooking his seat belt.   
  
“Wait a minute, I have to get snippets of you and Dean together, and now you want me to sit in on your big gay Q&A session, too?”  
  
“It won’t take long, and you can stay in the car if you like.”   
  
“Dude! Come on, whatever happened to ‘Bros before hos’?”  
  
Castiel’s brow furrowed. “Dean is not a ho.”  
  
“Castiel, according to the laws of the Bro Code, a ho is any romantic or sexual partner who threatens brohood, the most sacred level of male friendship. In this context, Dean is your ho.”  
  
“In that case, consider this an inquiry based solely on my own curiosity,” Castiel said, stepping out of the car.   
  
“Aw, crap,” Chuck muttered, getting out after him. He wasn’t about to send a former angel through a crowd of religious zealots by himself.  
  
Castiel strode purposefully across the lot with Chuck a step behind him, his shirt immediately catching the attention of the protesters. Most of their signs were abortion-related, but they had a selection of anti-homosexuality ones in the mix, too, and one guy stepped forward to yell, “Sinners!”  
  
Another protester piped up, “You’re going to burn in Hell!”   
  
“A man shall not lie with another man as with a woman!”  
  
The last one made Castiel pause at the door. “You wouldn’t have gotten along with Leviticus,” he told the protester who’d said it. “He didn’t like anyone.” That shut them up long enough for Chuck to shove Castiel through the front doors.  
  
The waiting area inside was sunny, with cheerful pastel pamphlets displayed all along the walls. Castiel went immediately to the front desk and announced, “I would like to meet with someone to talk about anal sex.”  
  
“Oh my god,” Chuck muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’ll be over there pretending to be invisible if you need me.” He retreated to a chair in the farthest corner from the from the front desk, near a pregnant woman who was texting on her cell phone. A minute later, a woman in a scrub top came out and ushered Castiel into the back, giving his blue lips a curious look.  
  
“I think it’s sweet that you came with him,” said the woman with the cell phone. “My boyfriend always waits in the car.”   
  
“Oh, I’m not—we’re not, uh, boyfriends,” Chuck stammered. “We’re friends.”  
  
She nodded, giving him a knowing look. “I had a friend like that once. Don’t rule out the possibility of it becoming more than physical, honey. He just may be the one.”  
  
Chuck shoved his face behind the nearest magazine, which turned out to be a copy of  _Highlights for Children_  from 1995, the only kids’ magazine in the place. He spent the next twenty minutes building a mental backstory for Goofus and Gallant and wishing he had thought to bring a notebook. He'd been too nervous about the trip to write before they left, and now that he was driving, he couldn't crank out a chapter on the road.  
  
When Castiel emerged from the back, the counselor accompanying him was wearing a slightly shellshocked expression and he was saying, “Thank you. I had no idea mortal bodies were capable of such fascinating things.”  
  
Chuck rushed them back out to the car before his cheeks could get any redder. “Is your curiosity sated now? Can we get on with the road trip?”  
  
“Yes, and I got several informative pamphlets. I looked for one for you, but they didn’t have any on onanism.”  
  
Chuck pulled out of the parking lot with a screech of rubber. “Hey, archangel? If you’re listening, would you mind smiting me right now? I’d really appreciate it.”  
  
“Archangels don’t smite their human wards,” Castiel said, stuffing pamphlets into the glove box. “I’m curious about this Bro Code you mentioned earlier. I didn’t know there were rulebooks for friendships.”  
  
“It’s not a rulebook so much as a loose set of unwritten guidelines. One of which is ‘A bro shall not let another bro walk into a hostile situation alone,’ so you’re welcome.”  
  
“I doubt Leviticus had any bros who would do that for him,” Castiel mused, swirling his melting Icee around in the cup. “What are the rest of the guidelines?”  
  
“Well, they’re all basically the same. Put your bro before others, have his back, help him out when he needs it, that sort of thing.”  
  
“Ah,” Castiel said, taking a long sip of the Icee. “This is quite an educational day.”  
  
“The more we get together, the happier we’ll be,” Raffi sang from the speakers.  
  
***  
  
They cycled through cassettes for the next couple of hours, paring down the collection to a few that were worth listening to. Raffi stayed, in spite of Castiel’s objections that one could not “ote” fruit. Ricky Nelson got ejected after two songs because it reminded Chuck too much or riding in his grandma’s smoke-filled Studebaker as a kid. The Celtic-inspired fan music about Herald-Mage Vanyel was pretty badass, but Chuck didn’t think lutes were an element of good road trip music, so it was retired to the glove compartment amidst Castiel’s collection of gay sex pamphlets. (Chuck, having read enough Mercedes Lackey to get the references in the songs, thought this was appropriate.) And when he put _Greatest Novelty Hits_  in the tape deck, it got halfway through “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter From Camp)” before Castiel ejected it and threw it out the window with all the force he could muster.  
  
Chuck examined a tape of marching band music. “Do you think if we left these in the car for two weeks they’d turn into  _Queen’s Greatest Hits_?”  
  
“Wrong Armageddon,” Castiel answered.  
  
Geto Boys, it turned out, was a winner. But while “Damn, it Feels Good to be a Gangsta” was great driving music, Castiel had a ridiculously good memory for lyrics, and having a fallen angel singing about “gangsta-ass niggas” in the passenger seat made Chuck a little uncomfortable. (To say nothing of “wannabe, gonnabe, cock suckin’, pussy eatin’ prankstas,” which was just several shades of wrong coming out of Castiel.)  
  
And so, when they rolled into Lawrence, Kansas, Chuck and Castiel were on their twenty-somethingth listen to one non-Ace of Base cassette they both agreed on fully. It was a single, but somehow, as  _How I Met Your Mother_  promised, it came back around after getting old.  
  
“DUN-UN DUH!” Chuck sang at the top of his lungs.  
  
“DUN-UN DUH!” Castiel echoed, and joined in with “Dun-dun-dun-dundundundundundudundundundun!”  
  
“AND IIII WOULD WALK FIVE HUNDRED MILES, AND III WOULD WALK FIVE HUNDRED MORE,” they crooned, Chuck conducting with one finger. “JUST TO BE THE MAN WHO WALKS A THOUSAND MILES TO FALL DOWN AT YOUR DO-O-OOOORRRR!”  
  
“Nailed it,” Chuck said.  
  
“You were a little flat,” Castiel said.   
  
“I don’t think it’s fair that they left the angelic sense of tone when they took your grace,” Chuck shot back, and regretted it the moment he glanced over at Castiel’s face. His smile had dropped away into the kind of funereal expression he’d used while imparting bad news in his angel days. “Oh, man, I’m sorry,” Chuck said. “I didn’t mean to—”  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” Castiel said, but his hand reached up to rub the spot where his grace had been.   
  
“Does it still hurt?” Chuck asked.  
  
Castiel licked his lips slowly, staring straight ahead. Then he said, “A bit.”  
  
Chuck hissed. “Motherfrakker.”  
  
The opening guitar chords of The Proclaimers came back in, and they drove for a little with just the music between them.   
  
Chuck was glad that Sam had attached a detailed Google Maps route to their itinerary, because the way to Missouri’s wasn’t imprinted in his memory like the way to Bobby’s had been. Once they were on her block, he had to identify her house by details from his own book - gray siding and the oval stained glass window on one wall. The sign out front reading “Psychic Readings” helped, too. He parked out front and stuffed his hands into his pockets as he walked up to the house side by side with Castiel.   
  
“I wish Sam and Dean were here. I suck at introductions,” he said.  
  
“I could introduce us.”  
  
“Yeah, ‘cause your history of introducing yourself to psychics is great.”  
  
Castiel frowned, but less somberly this time.  
  
The moment Chuck raised his hand to knock on the front door, it swung open, and there was Missouri, just as he’d written her, right down to the silvery flecks in her cardigan. Smiling at them, she pushed a Coke into each of their hands.   
  
“Well, come inside, boys,” she said. “We need to talk.”  
  
Castiel and Chuck looked at each other and shrugged, following her into the house. The place was a classic Victorian with furniture to match in the front rooms, every inch of it immaculate except the magazines stacked messily on a coffee table in the parlor where she led them. A cross-stitched sign behind her wingback chair displayed a price list for palm readings.   
  
“My name is Castiel,” Castiel said. “I am—”  
  
“A former angel,” Missouri finished, raising an eyebrow at him. “I know who you are.” She gave Chuck a glance. “And you’re the one needing a lesson on exercising your extra senses. Chuck. That’s some kinda name for a prophet.”  
  
“Th-thanks?” Chuck said, taking a seat on couch.   
  
“Miss Mosely, you’re very good,” Castiel said.  
  
“First off,” said Missouri, shooting him a disapproving look as she sat down, “none of this ‘Miss’ crap. Call me Missouri. Second, Dean Winchester called ahead to let me know you were coming.” She shook her head. “I could feel you boys coming from miles away, like the prickle up the back of your neck before a storm rolls in. I haven’t felt that much power around here since Lucifer came through town last month.”  
  
Chuck’s throat constricted, and goose bumps rose on his arms. “Lucifer came here?”   
  
“Mm-hm. Came and went. Leiurely, like he was just strolling through.” Missouri shivered slightly, then clapped her hands and put on a smile. “Now, I’ve got a spare bed upstairs, a fold-out couch, and a wall of the pantry ready for a sigil, and one of you needs to get me up to speed on what’s going on with you and the Winchesters.”  
  
“Well, honestly, right now we’re not a hundred percent sure what’s going on,” Chuck said. “They ditched us without…” He paused.   
  
Missouri was staring at Castiel with an almost angel level intensity. She pursed her lips, narrowed her eyes at him, and then said, “Dean Winchester? Our Dean Winchester?”  
  
Castiel looked away from her quickly, but evidently she’d already gotten what she was after, because she rocked back in her chair with an enormous laugh, saying, “My lord,  _that_  I never saw coming!” She laughed so hard that for a moment Chuck was afraid she was going to fall over. Righting herself on the arm of the chair, she said to Castiel, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry you had to fall for a Winchester man.” And then the grin and the laughter came back, and she wiped tears out of her eyes, waving in Chuck’s direction. “Chuck, you go bring in your things while your friend and I talk. We’re fine here.”  
  
Castiel passed him a shaken look that said quite firmly he was not fine here, but the situation wasn’t hostile, so Chuck deemed it well within the Bro Code to leave him there and dash back to the car.   
  
He didn’t like meeting strangers. Especially, he decided just now, strangers who could read his mind and potentially laugh at the contents. Maybe that was the plus side of having no love life - nothing for psychics to laugh at. Chuck grabbed his and Castiel’s duffel bags from the trunk and his box of writing and books from the backseat, taking his time. And when he found a half-filled notebook peeking out from between other things in the box, he looked back at the house, then took a seat on the hood of the station wagon and flipped open the notebook.   
  
He hadn’t written anything in two days. That was longer than he’d gone since this whole thing had started - any of it, as far back as the beginning of the series. Not writing made his head hum and his fingers itch. He braced the notebook on one knee, took a deep breath, and tried to concentrate.   
  
“Okay,” he murmured. “Sam and Dean. Where did you two idjits go?”  
  
The words began swarming into his head, and he put pen to paper. It was surprisingly easy, without any distractions.  
  
 _Dean glanced over at the road atlas in his brother’s lap. “This many years on the road, and you really think we need that thing?”  
  
“The coordinates have to be precise, Dean,” Sam answered. “Exactly thirteen miles north of the oldest church in LaCrosse.”   
  
Dean sighed, giving the rearview a suspicious glance like he was checking for someone on their tail. “Think this is gonna work?”  
  
“If it doesn’t, we’re screwed anyway. It’s worth a try.”   
  
“Straight into the belly of the beast,” Dean muttered. “Well, great, I’ve got just the soundtrack for that.” He popped a cassette into the tape deck, and Sam groaned as AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” blared from the speakers. _  
  
Chuck stared at the words he’d written, trying to make sense of them. LaCrosse, Wisconsin, the belly of the beast? Oh Bartleby, said a dry Alan Rickman voice in his head, was Wisconsin really  _that_  bad?  
  
His stomach knotted. He couldn’t put his finger on the reason, but he had a very, very bad feeling about this. Hauling bags over his shoulders and a box in hand, Chuck jogged back up the steps to Missouri’s house to start prepping the protection sigils.


	3. Chapter 3

The first night at Missouri’s, Chuck found himself staring up at a decorative ceiling sconce from the fold-out bed in the first floor den and almost wishing he was back in Bobby’s panic room. The panic room was familiar, if hard and uncomfortable. The panic room didn’t smell like lemon Endust and burned sage, which tickled his nostrils. And the panic room didn’t have any stupid sconces shaped like ceiling boobs, complete with little ceiling boob nipples, which reminded him just how long it had been since he’d seen a real boob. Or two, for that matter. No, the panic room was decorated all “You’re trapped, sorry” and “Enjoy the apocalypse,” which he was used to. The devil you know…he thought, glancing at his writing notebook on the desk across the room. Maybe he could check in on the Winchesters.  
  
The door creaked, and Castiel’s voice called softly, “Are you awake?”  
  
“Yeah,” Chuck answered, sitting up.   
  
Castiel let himself into the room, his shoulders hunched and his expression unreadable in the dark. The fold-out couch groaned as he lay down on the other side of it, tucking a throw pillow under his head. When Chuck stared at him, he said, “I couldn’t sleep alone upstairs. I’ve never slept without someone else in the room.”  
  
Chuck forgot sometimes that the entirety of Castiel’s experience as a human had been spent living out of somebody else’s pocket. “You’ll get used to it someday,” he said.  
  
“Does that day have to be today?”  
  
Chuck did a quick mental calculation involving his masculinity, the width of the bed, and the likelihood of accidental nighttime snuggling. “Nah, it’s okay. Just don’t spoon me in your sleep - that’d make things weird.”   
  
“I promise to refrain from spooning you, Chuck.” The shadows on Castiel’s face shifted as he frowned. “There’s a breast on the ceiling.”  
  
“Yep.”  
  
“Is that intentional?”  
  
“Probably not.”  
  
Castiel sighed, and as if reminded by the boob-shaped sconce, he said, “I wonder where Dean is tonight.”  
  
“Yeah,” Chuck said, his voice fading off into the dark.   
  
The truth was, Chuck knew where Dean was. Sam and Dean were spending the night in a motel with taxidermy fish on the wall just outside La Crosse, Wisconsin. He’d written the tail end of their road trip that evening, the bickering and the soundtrack exactly the same as any other Winchester family road trip. And then, because his mind was on the KFC he’d had earlier, his “new and improved” prophet powers had seen fit to give him a half-hour sneak peek into Missouri’s neighbor’s upcoming trip to the restaurant. And while Chuck was an equal opportunity fast food connoisseur, he didn’t appreciate spending five pages of notebook paper describing elderly Mrs. Whitaker attempting to eat a Double Down.   
  
After a few minutes, Castiel’s breath slowed and started catching in the soft snores that had become familiar nighttime white noise for Chuck in their weeks in the panic room. Chuck stared up at the boob light on the ceiling, trying to shut up his brain long enough to fall asleep. But it kept skipping through topics.   
  
Sam and Dean. Armageddon. Bruce Willis. Yippee kayay, motherlover—man, when was the last time he’d seen that movie uncensored? It was always on TV. Still, what a great line. Would he get a great heroic line like that in this apocalypse? Or at least some badass final words? Nah, he’d probably be struck down by Lucifer while he was talking about something embarrassing. Bananaphone. Boob lights.  _X-Men_  fanfic.   
  
And that’d be it - archangel or not, that’d be his real, permanent death. Chuck had written enough stories to know how he fit into the one he was in. He was  _so_  not important enough to live through the End Days. He was like the comic relief in a Whedon show - doomed to a sudden, barely-mourned death when stuff got serious. If he was really lucky, he’d be a Wash - he’d pull some neat trick first, and geeks at a convention someday would hold a Chuck Shurley Memorial Luau with little plastic dinosaurs and drinks with pineapple on the straws. His mind ran off into the place where the Holy Crap I Died knot had come from, straining to remember what was in that stretch of dark unknown between the moment Dickface’s sword slid out of his gut and the moment he woke up in the panic room.  
  
Chuck swallowed. Crap, this wasn’t doing any good. He sat up and swung his legs off the sofa-bed, careful not to disturb Castiel. Grabbing his writing notebook, he retreated out into the house. He managed to hit both shins on end tables in the search for a light switch in the parlor. Curling up like a little kid in Missouri’s big wingback chair, he gave his shins a quick rub and then flattened his notebook over one leg.   
  
Now, he thought, let’s try this concentration thing again. Putting his pen to the page, Chuck ran a mental script of SamDeanSamDeanSamDean until something pulled words from his fingertips.  
  
 _  
Dean twirled his keyring around his pointer finger, tossed it, and caught it again. “So, what’s this cosmic phone booth look like?”  
  
“It’s not a matter of seeing it,” said Sam, his forehead rippled with concentration lines. “See, when Lucifer was cast out of Heaven, he didn’t just get tossed down some cosmic laundry chute into Hell. It was worse than that - like falling from the top of a tree and hitting every branch on the way down, except in this case, all the branches are different planes of existence.”  
  
Dean tossed and caught his keys again, giving Sam the sort of look he usually reserved for televangelists and Lean Pockets commercials. “Yeah, thanks, Captain Exposition, I got that part. Your point being?”  
  
“My point being that the spot where Lucifer fell through Earth will be marked psychically, not visibly. That’s why we should be able to pass messages through it - it’ll be a spot where things fall through the fabric in space - like a miniature Bermuda Triangle.”  
  
Dean tossed his keys with a laugh. “So we’re looking for something we can’t even—” He paused, waving his hand in the air. “Wait.”  
  
“What?” Sam said.  
  
“My keys,” Dean said, scanning the patch of bare dirt he’d just walked past. “I threw ‘em in the air, and then they went…somewhere.”  
  
Sam pulled a stray stick from the ground and tossed it into the air just above that bald patch of earth. The stick vanished before their eyes. He beamed. “I think we’ve found our cosmic phone booth.”  
  
“Hey!” Dean shouted at the spot, clenching his fists. “That cosmic phone booth ate my keys!”  
  
“Just be glad you didn’t step in it,” Sam said, laying out his backpack on the ground and grabbing some books out of it. “Now, the ritual takes about 12 hours to complete and needs to end at midnight, so we need to prep everything for tomorrow.”  
  
Dean just glared at the bald patch of earth. “I got that keychain for finishing the biggest burger in Arizona.” _  
  
Chuck reread the passage. A message? What the crap were they doing?  
  
***  
  
Chuck still had the last vision hanging hazily behind his eyelids at 8am, when Missouri woke them with a knock at the door and a call of “Morning, boys! If you want breakfast, you best disentangle yourselves soon!”  
  
Castiel had very much not kept his promise. The former angel was sprawled across the sofa-bed, one arm making friends with Chuck’s chest and his face pressed into the back of Chuck’s neck. Chuck grumbled, shoving Castiel off him, and pulled on a pair of jeans to make himself decent for breakfast.   
  
The moment he stepped into the kitchen, his eyes went wide. “You made waffles?”   
  
Missouri had a whole stack of them balanced on a plate in the middle of the kitchen table, along with a bottle of what looked to be—Chuck had to bite his lip to keep from drooling all over the linoleum— _real_  maple syrup.   
  
“I always make waffles for guests,” she answered as she sat down beside him, adding a bowl of sliced strawberries to the spread. “I find that most people are more willing to help wash dishes when they’ve got a belly full of waffles.”  
  
“I will wash your dishes,” Chuck said, pulling waffles onto his plate. “I will wash all your dishes. Possibly forever.” They were good waffles, too - slightly crispy on the outside and chewy in the middle, with just the right size pockets to hold the perfect amount of syrup. Chuck’s eyes about rolled back into his head with the first bite. Oh god, waffles.   
  
Castiel sat down opposite them, looking uncomfortable, and Missouri shot him a look.   
  
“Boy, you can take care of that problem in the shower.” At the wide-eyed glance he gave her in response, she said, “Well, go on!”  
  
Castiel got up, looking even more uncomfortable, and fled the room.  
  
Chuck swallowed a laugh along with a mouthful of waffles. “You’re, like, the best hostess ever.”  
  
“I don’t abide sexual tension at my table,” Missouri replied. “Nasty sensation to share over breakfast. Sours everything.”  
  
“So then, if I told you I’m about ready to make out with you out of waffle-related gratitude, you wouldn’t appreciate that?”  
  
“I’d take that as a compliment,” Missouri said with a smirk, and eyed him. “Except for the part where it’s not entirely hyperbole. I’m sorry about your dry spell, Chuck, but keep it in your pants.”  
  
“Yes’m,” he answered, nodding toward his stack of waffles.  
  
A door creaked open down the hallway behind the kitchen, and Castiel’s voice called, “Um, excuse me—”   
  
“Cabinet behind the door,” Missouri called back. “Help yourself.”   
  
“Thank you.” The bathroom door shut, and a moment later, the pipes grumbled to life.  
  
Chuck frowned. “What—”  
  
“Towels,” Missouri said.  
  
“Ah. Wow. You’re really, um…”   
  
“Psychic?” she offered.  
  
“In control,” Chuck said.   
  
She gave him the same half pitying, half amused look his Phys Ed teacher in middle school had given him whenever he tried to play goalie in floor hockey. “Honey, I’ve been doing this for years. Believe me, I’ve been where you are. I know the uncertainty, the feeling that something’s wrong with you because you can’t see what’s ahead of you. It took me years to figure out my abilities.”   
  
Chuck slouched over his plate, which was already looking like Jackson Pollock: The Breakfast Period. Waffles weighed heavy in his stomach. “I’ve got a week, if that.”   
  
Missouri nodded. “Well, then, I guess we’d better start as quick as possible. Finish your breakfast.”  
  
Chuck didn’t need to be told twice.  
  
***  
  
After everyone had been fed and the guys had washed all the dishes, Missouri took them back into her psychic parlor and set up a small circular table between the chairs. Castiel watched silently from the doorway, his arms crossed and a mildly curious look written on his face. Missouri didn’t invite him to have a seat at the table, and he didn’t ask.   
  
“So, uh,” Chuck said, settling into the chair opposite Missouri’s wingback, “is this where we set up candles and sacred symbols and stuff?”  
  
“No,” she said, taking her seat and holding out her hands across the table, “I just like having somewhere to rest my elbows. Give me your hands.”  
  
Chuck did. Missouri’s hands were warm and soft - and embarrassingly, a little bigger than his own. His shoulders tensed at the touch and drew even closer together as he sensed something he could only describe as a prickle of psychic energy weaving up through his arms. He wondered if sensing psychic energy was a new part of his prophety repertoire or if he’d just never been around anyone with powers he could suss out before.   
  
Missouri’s eyes closed in—was that a wince? “Oh, honey. You’ve got one powerful connection here.”  
  
“What do you mean?” Chuck said, not sure he wanted to know the answer. “I’m just following the one story - the Winchester Gospel. That’s it. Isn’t it?”  
  
The moment she pursed her lips, his stomach plummeted. “Put it this way: I’m a pretty damn powerful psychic. I can reach into the ether beyond the here and now surface of this world anytime I want, and I can reach in a couple different directions at once. My connection is like a phone with with a conference call feature.” She frowned outright and opened her eyes, looking at him almost apologetically. “Chuck, you’ve got the whole switchboard in front of you. I’ve never seen anything like it.”  
  
Chuck slumped back in his chair and eyed the ceiling, muttering under his breath to God or Ceiling Cat or whatever entity was up there, “Thanks a lot.”  
  
“It’s no wonder your visions come the way they do,” Missouri went on. “You’re reaching blind into an almost unlimited pool of information.”  
  
“How do I…not do that?”   
  
“You train yourself to get more specific. Here.” She gripped his hands tighter and closed her eyes again. “I’ll send you some focusing energy, and you visualize the switchboard in front of you.”  
  
Visualization exercises. Great. Just like that creative writing course he’d taken freshman year - the one where the professor had tried to get everyone to do yoga. Chuck hoped really hard that this exercise wouldn’t end with a trip to the school nurse, too. He shot Castiel a worried look, but his friend just shrugged, not looking terribly concerned. Clearly, no one had ever made him do yoga for writers.  
  
Chuck closed his eyes and let himself imagine a switchboard. He’d never seen one in person, so it came out a brightly colored maze of cartoon levers, like something out of the space ship in  _Invader Zim_. His brain started making stupid references to the show, and he shut it down, trying hard to concentrate on the image.  
  
“You see it?” Missouri asked, her voice low and calming.  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“I want you to narrow in on just one section of your switchboard. Picture each part clearly labeled with the name of a person or event you’re concerned with.”  
  
The labels materialized almost without a thought, and Chuck searched through them. The “I DIED” lever was bigger than he’d expected, and labeled in all caps, Impact font. It was even bigger than the “Apocalypse” lever in the middle of the board. Next to it was a smaller lever labeled “Getting laid,” and next to that, a cluster of levers bearing the names of everyone he’d been cloistered in Bobby’s house with.   
  
“Now,” Missouri said, “I want you to very pointedly choose the ones your interested in. Flip those switches together and let your connection show you how they intersect.”  
  
“That’s not how a switchboard works.”  
  
“It’s imagery, boy. Don’t sass me.”  
  
Castiel chuckled in the doorway, and Missouri shushed him, too.  
  
Chuck ran his mental hand across the switches, careful not to accidentally touch the “Cas/Dean” lever, and chose four: “Lucifer,” “Apocalypse,” “Castiel,” and “Heaven.” They were vague enough, but maybe together they’d give him a sense of what was going to happen to Castiel at the end of all—  
  
Pain shot through Chuck’s mind so sharply it buckled him over against Missouri’s table, his teeth clenched and his fingertips digging into her palms. He saw images in flashes like migraine auras: Lucifer wearing a blonde man’s face, a blade jutting into pale flesh, blood coloring the corners of a pair of familiar lips, and last, Castiel crumpling to the floor of a dimly lit room like an abandoned doll.   
  
 _“You really thought you could save him, Castiel? Shame they took your good sense along with your grace.”_  
  
The pain held Chuck’s body taut, as if something were being driven slowly through his gut. Dimly, he heard Missouri swear and felt her hands peel themselves away from his own. His arms curled in toward his stomach, and as the stabbing sensation intensified, he tipped sideways. It was like Dickface’s sword running through him all over again - right down to the hollow vibration of his skull as he slammed sideways into the ground. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think anything but: oh god, gonna die, gonna die, pain, oh god—  
  
Hands landed on his shoulders, and a low, firm voice said, “Chuck. Breathe.”   
  
He took a shallow breath.  
  
“Good. Again.”  
  
He did it again, deeper this time. One of the hands left his shoulder and smoothed his hair back in a slow, soothing motion. Chuck took a deep, shaking breath and opened his eyes. Castiel was crouched over him, giving him a look that reminded him entirely too much of his own resurrection day. Missouri stood behind him, holding her hands and cringing.  
  
“Do you need a paper bag?” Castiel asked. Chuck shook his head, so he asked, “What was that? What did you see?”  
  
Chuck’s mouth tasted like sand. “N-nothing,” he choked out. It couldn’t happen. Wouldn’t happen. The thought of that being real—  
  
“That didn’t look like nothing,” Castiel said, frowning.   
  
“It was nothing,” Chuck said, his chest going tight again. “Noth—” He scrunched his eyes shut, trying to shove out the memory of the pain. There went his breathing again.  
  
“Paper bag,” Castiel barked. “Now!”  
  
Chuck heard the clack of Missouri’s sensible heels rushing out of the room, and then he pulled himself up into a tight little ball in his mind and tried to not hear anything.  
  
***  
  
His notebook had run out half an hour ago, and he was now writing in a mostly-unused day planner from 2004, which Missouri had happened to have in a drawer. That would run out, too, but he had plans now: a half-empty address book from his own glove compartment, a stack of loose sheets of scrap paper from the recycling bin in the kitchen, and an offer from Castiel to run to the store for more notebooks if those ran out.   
  
 _When_  those ran out. Which, at this rate, would be a day or less. Chuck’s wrist hurt from all the writing. And his thighs from having writing materials pressed hard against them. And his ass, because he’d been huddled in the bathtub in the first floor bathroom for three hours now, the curtain drawn, the door locked, and his bare feet sweating against the smooth finish of the tub. A clawfoot bathtub might provide the lumbar support an ultra-private writer’s retreat needed, but cushiony it was not.   
  
He couldn’t flip back the “Apocalypse” switch in his mental switchboard. His inner eye was laser-focused like the goddamn Eye of Sauron, except instead of peeping on hobbits, it was taking in every iota of information about the Winchester boys.   
  
What they were thinking the moment they woke up.   
  
Which bottles they reached for first in the shower.  
  
The fight over which way to squeeze the toothpaste tube, which they’d had so many times in the many, many mornings they’d lived together that Chuck didn’t understand why Sam didn’t just buy his own damn toothpaste already.  
  
Breakfast.  
  
Post-breakfast Dean snack and post-breakfast Sam tooth flossing.  
  
The entire. Damn. Trek. To the field.   
  
And the entire. Damn. Ritual. It was in some ancient language that Chuck had never researched, with candles and chanting and small animal sacrifice (Dean was surprisingly merciless with the pet store guinea pig they’d picked out). Every detail of the damn ritual was documented now in Chuck’s rushed scrawl, pages and pages of it, so that what would otherwise be a plot-important and fascinating supernatural event had taken on all the narrative power of a really long to-do list. When it finally got to the good part, Chuck was so relieved he could’ve kissed the day planner.  
  
 _“To any who doubt.” The words were burned into a scrap of leather Sam held in his hands.  
  
“So, that’s it?” Dean said, eyeing them. “We just toss that into the hole, and that’s it?”  
  
“Sort of,” Sam said, heaving a sigh. All the hours of chanting and attention to ritual had left him exhausted, the core of him tugged in different directions by the forces he’d summoned. “We need to take off our own protections first, so that they can hear us. Then we talk. Then we go to meet them.”  
  
Dean took off his protective necklace, shivering slightly at being so exposed. Sam followed suit, and they both tossed their necklaces on the coals of the fire where the bones of the guinea pig were already half ash.   
  
“Ladies first,” Dean said, motioning toward the bald patch of earth just outside the fire ring.   
  
Sam didn’t even complain, his heart lodged too firmly in his throat to expend more words than necessary. He stepped forward and let the scrap of leather drop toward the ground. It disappeared just a few inches from that patch of dirt. Light flared from it, shooting up toward the clouds overhead. He swallowed. “Um, okay.” Throwing back his shoulders, he knelt beside the spot and spoke directly into it.   
  
“To any who doubt in Hell,” he said, “I am Sam Winchester, favored child of Azazel. Your so-called god, Lucifer, has only his own interests at heart. You are the pebbles in the treads of his boots, and if he wins, he’ll make quick work of annihilating your kind. Stand with me, and we might have the power to stop him. If you wish to join me, meet me in this city, at the bar on Third in an hour.”  
  
“Might have to be more specific than that, Sammy. It’s Wisconsin.”  
  
“The bar with the walleye on its sign,” Sam amended, “on Third.” He stood up and motioned for Dean to take his turn.  
  
Dean knelt beside the glowing patch of earth and said, “To any who doubt in Heaven…good for you. I’m Dean Winchester. You might know me as the chosen one. If you want to join me and fight to stop this stupid apocalypse, meet me right here in an hour.”   
  
“That’s it?” Sam said. “That’s the message you’re going to send out to all the potential dissenting angels in Heaven, to try to get them on your side?”  
  
“What, you want me to re-record it?”  
  
Sam shook his head and poured water on the coals, snuffing them out in a plume of acrid yellow smoke. The light from the hole between planes cut out. “I guess we go our separate ways, then.”   
  
“Yep.” Dean tossed him the spare keys to the Impala.  
  
“You want me to pick you up after we’ve each assembled our Justice Leagues?”  
  
“Nah.” Dean tapped his first two fingers to his forehead in an imitation of how Cas used to touch him to zap him place to place. “My team’s got faster-than-light travel. I’ll give you a call if I need a ride. You just make sure you don’t wreck her.”  
  
Sam snorted a laugh at his big brother and got into the car by himself._  
  
Fingers rapped at the bathroom door.  
  
The pencil scraped off the edge of the day planner, and Chuck cursed under his breath.   
  
“Chuck?” Castiel’s voice was low and worried. “Are you okay?”  
  
“Just peachy,” Chuck answered, an octave too high and way too chipper.  
  
“I don’t mean to criticize your wording, but I thought ‘peachy’ was good. You don’t sound good.” A pause. “And you’ve been in the bathroom for several hours.”  
  
“Look, I’m fine,” Chuck snapped. “I just need some time alone to—”   
  
The visions pressed at the back of his eyes, giving him flashbacks to that horrible Schwarzenegger movie where the main characters left the protective bubble of the Mars colony and their eyes started bugging out from the lack of pressure or—  
  
His hand moved without his permission, back to work.   
  
 _Sam was only at the bar for 45 minutes before the demons began to show up. The first, wearing a portly blonde woman, bowed her head to him and bought him a beer. The second, wearing what looked like a college stoner, challenged him to pool. By the time the game was well underway, the bar was crowded with demons of all shapes and ages, with one unspoken thought shining hopefully in their eyes: Lucifer had to go down._  
  
YES, Chuck thought, even as his hand catalogued the basic descriptions of two dozen demons in the crowd. So this was the plan: get support from dissenters on both sides and raise a small army against Lucifer. It wasn’t a bad plan, assuming they could find a way to, y’know,  _kill_  Lucifer.   
  
“Chuck?” Castiel tried at the door again.  
  
“Not now,” Chuck said.   
  
“It’s lunchtime.”   
  
“I’m not hungry.” Which wasn’t strictly true, but he was much more interested in what was happening—  
  
 _Across town, in the field where the cosmic phone booth lay, Dean stood fiddling with a pocketknife and wishing he’d brought a book. The meeting time had passed five minutes ago, and weren’t angels supposed to be sticklers for things like promptness? Maybe that was just if they were under orders. Castiel had taken forever to do something for himself once he’d started to doubt.  
  
Castiel. Dean smiled out at the field. It was kind of embarrassing how excited he was to get back to the guy after this. Although he’d never admit it to Sam (or any living person), thinking of Castiel sent waves of warmth crashing together inside his chest. If Dean were the kind of guy to pay his feelings much mind - which he wasn’t - he would have assigned words like “bonded” and “love” and “unnecessary amounts of shmoopiness” to what he was feeling. Because he loved Castiel - he truly did, in his own way. Castiel ranked somewhere between the Impala and Sam in his eyes, and if he was honest with himself, he would totally have let Castiel drive the Impala. No doubt.  
  
“Dean,” said a familiar voice behind him.  
  
He turned and immediately felt like the air had been knocked out of him. “Anna? You’re alive?”  
  
Anna smiled, just shy of his personal bubble. She was still wearing the same vessel she’d been so fond of before, with those big watery eyes staring back at him and the same dark coat hanging off her thin frame. “Yes. I got your message. It’s so good to see you.”  
  
“Yeah, you too,” Dean said. “Hey, haven’t seen my keys, have you? They’re on a ring with this black rubber plaque, says ‘I survived The Beefalanche’?”  
  
“Sorry, no.” She looked sideways, her lips pinched into a thin line. “It’s not safe here. The angel who took over for Zachariah knows where you are.”  
  
Dean found himself glancing around the field as if any moment an army of angels would sprout from the grass. “All right, then, let’s get the hell outta here. I can give you the address we’ve gotta get to—”  
  
“No need,” Anna said, laying two fingers on his forehead.   
  
The world lurched, and Dean’s stomach went with it. He blinked hard, and then he blinked hard again, because he didn’t believe what was in front of him. His stomach went on moving without him.   
  
They were in Heaven’s green room, complete with the same gallery of angelic paintings and spread of fast food and beer as Dean had been treated to the day Lucifer rose. It even smelled the same - ozone and burgers. He took a step back, and a harp prodded him in the side.   
  
“Anna…” he said, his stomach whirling slowly toward a stop. “What the hell are we doing here?”  
  
“I’m delivering the champion to Heaven,” Anna said, that pleasant little smile never leaving her lips. “You’re sitting in the penalty box until the big fight’s on.”  
  
Dean’s blood ran cold. “The angel who took over for Zachariah…”  
  
“Me,” she said. “I never would’ve been offered the position if Cas hadn’t gotten me thrown into Heaven’s bible camp. Few angels in my position would have gotten that chance to reform.” Her smile broadened, and Dean’s throat clenched like a fist. “How is Cas, anyway? I’d love to talk to him.”  
  
“What, so you two can gab about how I am in the sack? I don’t think so.”  
  
Anna chuckled, picking up one of the beers from the tureen of ice on the table. “You and Cas are together now? Cute.” Positioning the bottle against the lip of the table, she smacked her palm down on it and sent the cap skittering across the floor. She took a drink, then offered it to Dean. The gesture was oddly human, and it turned his stomach. “Thirsty? It’s on the house.”  
  
“No,” he said, scowling.“How’d you find me?”  
  
“You sent an email to the staff mailing list, Dean. I answered.”  
  
“You…” Dean blinked hard, putting the pieces together. “You got that message?”  
  
Anna smiled again, almost shyly. “Yes, Dean, I still doubt. Doubt doesn’t negate loyalty; it tests it. Faith that grows in spite of doubt is stronger than faith that grows blind.”   
  
“Well, that’s lovely. You should send that one to Hallmark.”  
  
Anna approached him, slid the beer bottle into his hand, and kissed him on the cheek. “And you,” she said in his ear, “should have kept my brother’s blood sigils. Everyone’s seen what they did to Cas. You should have known that no angel would be stupid enough to risk the same fate by joining you.”   
  
Air whisked against Dean’s cheek, and he was alone in the room. He wheeled around, looking for his captor or an exit or—anything useful. The room was still and solid and just as maddening as the last time. He threw the beer bottle, sending it crashing into a painting of cherubs. “Son of a bitch!” _  
  
Chuck’s inner eye froze and sputtered like a web player buffering porn, and then it blacked out entirely. He stared at the words on the page in front of him, black marker scrawled over Missouri’s pencil appointment notes from April 2004. Was…was that it? Was that everything? He tested the Apocalypse switch on his mental switchboard. A hum of new scenes waited beneath it, but nothing more seemed to be trying to flush itself out onto the page at the moment.   
  
Chuck reread the scene he’d just finished, held the day planner against his stomach, and curled over onto his knees with a whimper. His insides moved in ways he was pretty sure were against their biology, his head throbbed, and something sour rose up the back of his throat. He hadn’t felt this sick since the week after junior year finals, and that had involved Jager, Cheez Whiz, and a  _Ren & Stimpy_ marathon.  
  
The lock on the bathroom door clicked and scraped like it was being picked - or at least, like lock-picking sounded like in his head, when he’d watched Sam and Dean do it. Chuck didn’t look up when the door opened. He heard the soft footsteps on the tile and knew by the careful landing of each heel that it was Castiel.  
  
“Chuck?”  
  
“Mmf.”  
  
“You weren’t answering, and you missed lunch. Are you okay?”  
  
“Nmmo,” Chuck said miserably into the knee of his jeans.  
  
The rings on the shower curtain rattled as it pulled aside, and a shadow overlapped Chuck’s on the tub basin. Castiel’s hand made a long stroke down his hair, then another. It was comforting, in a juvenile sort of way, for about five seconds.  
  
“Dude,” Chuck said, lifting his head from his knees, “I’m not a spaniel.”  
  
“Sorry,” Castiel said, his hand retreating to his lap. “I’m not good at this.” His eyes scanned the room, taking inventory of every spot where spare pages lay. “Are these all visions?”  
  
“Yep,” Chuck said, hugging the day planner tightly.  
  
“And that?” Castiel said, frowning at the pages in the toilet.   
  
“Also visions.” Chuck pulled a face. “No one deserves to read the things your boyfriend does in the bathroom after his morning coffee.”  
  
“You’ve seen him, then?”   
  
The question hung in the air for a very long second. Chuck swallowed. Crap. Castiel couldn’t find out about the whole heavenly abduction deal. If he knew, he’d find some way to go rushing off after Dean, and Chuck had promised Dean he’d keep a lid on Castiel’s thrilling heroics. And if he went the route of thrilling heroics—  
  
 _“You really thought you could save him, Castiel?”_  
  
No. No, no, nonono. That wasn’t going to happen. Not if he could stop it.  
  
Chuck’s stomach felt like it was doing a curly fry impersonation. He gripped the day planner so hard he felt his knuckles turning white. “They’re in Wisconsin, tracking down a lead on Lucifer.” It wasn’t a total lie.   
  
Castiel frowned. “Why would they ditch us to do something as simple as tracking a lead?”  
  
Chuck forced a smirk. “Because, dude, as far as they’re concerned, we’re the Zeppos.”  
  
“Oh! ‘The Zeppo!’” Castiel said. “I was trying to remember that name earlier. It’s definitely in my top five episodes.”  
  
“Yeah, mine, too,” Chuck said quietly. He wasn’t much in the mood for  _Buffy_  talk. To be honest, 90% of him was in the mood to curl up in a little ball next to the toilet and the remaining 10% was ready to run in a circle on the front lawn yelling, “Oh god oh god, we’re all gonna die!” He rubbed one eye, which was sore from focusing on the page in front of him for so long. “This sucks ass. I don’t want to be the damn prophet. I’ve spent four hours in here—”  
  
“Five,” Castiel corrected gently.  
  
“—five hours in here writing every stupid detail of every stupid scene that somebody up there—” he raised his head in the direction of the ceiling “—wants me to write, boring parts included, because my inner eye doesn’t come with a manual.” His voice rose. “All I’m doing is putting words on the page for you, you hear me? If all you want is a word processor, get an AlphaSmart! This isn’t fair!”  
  
Ugh, yelling made his head twinge.  
  
“Chuck,” Castiel said, catching his gaze. “What does S. Morgenstern teach us about fairness?”  
  
Chuck sighed and dropped his head back to his knees. “That life isn’t fair, and anyone who says differently is selling something.”  
  
Castiel patted him on the back - and okay, that was a lot better than the hair stroking thing. “Come on, let’s go make you a sandwich.”  
  
Taking a deep breath, Chuck pushed himself upright. His body came alive with aches and complaints, but he kept his mouth shut, gathered up his pages of visions, and kept the whole bundle of it firmly in his grip as he left the room behind his friend.  
  
***  
  
Each day for the next week went largely the same - minus the explosion of Castiel death that had torn open his inner eye in the first place. Wake up, practice working the switchboard with Missouri (who didn’t get the  _Invader Zim_ references, sadly), then spend hours hunched and writing while whoever was calling the shots upstairs hurled scenes at him.   
  
On the third day, Missouri got sick of her first floor bathroom being unavailable the whole afternoon and dug an old laptop out of the attic, on the promise that Chuck could use that so long as he wrote elsewhere. The machine was from 1998 and had a folder full of 80’s music midis on the desktop - her nephew’s, she claimed - but it had a wireless card hanging out of one side, and that was definitely an improvement. Chuck had been burying the most Dean-centric visions in the flower box outside the den window so Castiel wouldn’t find them, but it was a small flower box, and he was pretty sure Missouri would have his hide if he killed her tulips by moving them around too much. He didn’t even know what “have his hide” meant, exactly - just that she’d said it when Castiel had taken a cookie prematurely from the baking rack, and the words struck a deep chord of fear in him. Anyway. With the laptop, Chuck didn’t have to write on paper behind a locked door - he could shut himself in the den and write in a Google Doc, which no one had access to but him. If anyone tried to peek, all he had to do was minimize the window.  
  
In that Google Doc, Sam talked his demon army into using 100% recycled vessels, because, as he told them as they assembled outside the bar that first night, “You do this my way or you’re on your own.” None of the demons talked back.   
  
In that Google Doc, Sam and his demon army started the long drive toward Lawrence, Sam in the Impala taking the lead and a convoy of demons in shared cars dutifully following. (Sam was secretly pleased that they were carpooling to save the environment.)  
  
In that Google Doc, Sam smiled to himself, his arm warming on the door of the Impala as the wind rushed by, thinking of his brother and wondering what the hell they were going to do when their two sides came together.   
  
And in that Google Doc, Dean stewed in Heaven’s green room. He punched walls. He yelled at Anna. He yelled at Heaven. He yelled at God. He begrudgingly ate one burger, and then another, and then said “Ah, screw it,” and got totally plastered on Heaven’s beer. After passing out mid-yell, he woke up to find the tureen that had held the beer was now filled with virgin daiquiris. So he yelled at Anna some more.   
  
And those were the highlights. This wasn’t the apocalypse that Chuck had expected to write. Maybe it was all the aimless yelling, or the 2,300 words he’d spent chronicling the process of Sam’s cadre of demons breaking into the nearest impound lot to steal some junkers, or the additional text document he’d had to open to contain the descriptions of Sam’s hair - whoever was downloading the visions into his head really had a thing for Sam’s epic mane. Whatever it was, this apocalypse lacked something. Filters, maybe. It was too much - an info dump instead of a narrative. Too much summary, not enough scene.   
  
Chuck missed his happy-verse. Hell, at this point, he missed the Dean/Cas van scenes he’d been trying to burn out of his brain just a week ago. His fingers were tired and his mind felt hollowed out, but the moment his inner eye closed on the seventh day at Missouri’s, Chuck opened a new blank document and started writing something that didn't come from visions - something just for himself, out of his own imagination.  
  
 _“I am very glad we averted the apocalypse,” Dean said happily, drinking a beer on the hood of the Impala.  
  
“Yes,” Castiel said beside him. “I, too, am glad the world has not ended.”  
  
“Sam!” Dean cried, because Sam was approaching. “Where have you been?”  
  
“Working on that global warming thing,” Sam said, grabbing a beer from the cooler in the driver’s seat.   
  
“Are you glad the world didn’t end, Sam?”  
  
“So glad!” Sam enthused.  
  
“I am also glad we have beds now,” Castiel announced wistfully.   
  
“Yes, the beds are nice,” Dean agreed, grinning.  
  
“For fornicating in,” Castiel clarified.  
  
Sam looked very uncomfortable, but still glad the world hadn’t ended._  
  
Chuck deleted the document, slouched forward in his seat, and quietly hit his forehead against the desk until it was time for dinner.  
  
  
***  
  
After dinner, Chuck volunteered to help with cleanup so he could have time alone with Missouri. He crowded in next to her at the sink, his already sore hands working overtime with a scrub brush while she rinsed dishes.   
  
Missouri gave him a funny look. “Chuck, much as I appreciate the help, I’m not your momma and I do not appreciate having a grown man clinging to my apron strings.”  
  
“I just need to ask you something one-on-one,” he said, checking over his shoulder to be sure that Castiel wasn’t in earshot. The TV in the living room crackled to life with what sounded like one of those SyFy channel original movies - all screaming and stilted dialogue. Chuck wished he could join him out there, but he needed answers first. “Can you see it?” he asked Missouri. “When I get a vision?”  
  
Missouri pursed her lips and shook her head. “No, honey. If you’re thinking about something, I get a pretty clear picture, but you’ve got a private line running between you and whatever’s giving you those visions.”  
  
“Of course.” Chuck laughed, an unhappy sound that got lost in his throat. “You wanna hear something really selfish?” he asked, scraping cheese off a plate.  
  
“What?” she said, though he was sure she already knew.  
  
“Part of me kinda wished you’d be able to see my visions as they were coming through to me. Sort of a misery loves company thing.”  
  
Missouri laid a hand on the back of his neck, and a spot of dishwater seeped through the fabric of his t-shirt. “I don’t think that’s selfish, Chuck. Nobody wants to be alone.”  
  
Chuck opened his mouth to correct her, but stopped. Alone. Was he alone? He’d been more social in the last few months than he’d been in years. He’d lived in such close contact with people that he could identify them by the sounds of their bare footsteps. It had been a regular  _Full House_  at Bobby’s, with him playing the part of—well, he’d like to think he was one of the hilarious uncles, but he was probably annoying little Stephanie, if he was being honest with himself. And he had Castiel, who was more of a friend to him than anyone had been in—criminy, he didn’t want to think how long it had been since he’d had such a good friend. And yet, in the midst of all these people…  
  
Missouri dropped her hand back into the sink with a sympathetic frown. “I’m sorry you’ve gotta deal with all this. It’s not fair. If you want to share it with someone, you’re just going to have to let us know what your visions are. Talk them out. Show us your writing.”  
  
“No,” he answered immediately.  
  
“Why—” Missouri started, and her eyes went wide as she picked up on what Chuck was thinking about. Sam and Dean’s plan was there, laid out for her to see, and Dean’s capture, and on top of it all, Castiel’s dramatic death scene. Chuck didn’t know exactly how much Missouri would catch of it, but it was enough to make her back away from him, her hand at her collar and her eyes tearing up. “Jesus, Chuck. You’ve been keeping all that from us? Boy, you’ve gotta tell Castiel. You can’t keep him in the dark about something this big.”  
  
“Yes, I can,” Chuck said, scrubbing hard at a grease stain on one of the pots. Just the idea of telling Castiel made his insides knot up. He glanced over his shoulder, but all he could see from here was the TV screen and his friend’s feet crossed over each other on the couch. He lowered his voice to a whisper, barely audible over the faucet. “If I tell him, he’ll run off and try to pull some thrilling heroics. I promised Dean I wouldn’t let that happen, and the more I think about it, the more I think Dean was right to ask that. Castiel isn’t used to being breakable. If I tell him Dean’s in trouble, he’s not gonna think about his own well being - he’s gonna march straight into the thick of things and get himself killed.” Chuck shook his head. “I can’t let that happen.”  
  
“Honey, that’s fate,” Missouri said. “You can’t play games with fate.”  
  
“Sure I can,” Chuck said, tossing a clean pot into the other side of the sink. “It’s the one perk that comes with this stupid job.”  
  
Missouri closed her mouth sternly and drifted back to rinsing dishes. Chuck scrubbed furiously, his fingers clenching around the scrub brush. He’d gotten himself a big black mark in her mental binder of morals, he could tell. And he was quickly earning himself a title as a hack (if he hadn’t already had that), and a case of tendonitis, and the way tonight was headed, probably wrinkly prune fingers, too. But there was one thing he wasn’t going to lose.  
  
“Chuck,” Castiel called from the living room. “This man is kicking giant piranhas as they fly at him. You need to see this movie.”   
  
Chuck smiled to himself for the first time all day. Yeah, this was definitely the right choice.  
  



	4. Chapter 4

The game of “I’ve Never” was Missouri’s idea. Chuck was fairly certain she was trying to coax him into revealing certain Dean-related information to Castiel, but he didn’t care. He hadn’t had a drink in weeks, and when Missouri unlocked the liquor cabinet and lined up six clinking bottles and a six-pack of amber ale on the kitchen table, something inside him leapt like it was Christmas morning and he knew there was a Nintendo waiting for him under the tree.   
  
“Rules are simple,” Missouri told Castiel, who sat primly at the table with his hands folded in front of him. “When it’s your turn, you tell us something you’ve never done, starting the statement with ‘I’ve never…’ If either of us  _has_  done that thing, we have to take a drink.”  
  
“So,” Castiel said, furrowing his brow as he assessed the bottles, “I could say ‘I’ve never wet myself in front of a group of my friends,’ and Chuck would have to drink?”  
  
“Hey, I was stabbed with a sword and died! You’d piss yourself, too!”  
  
Missouri grinned at Castiel. “You’re going to be good at this.”  
  
“What’s the aim of this game?” he asked.  
  
“Drinking,” Chuck said, at the same time that Missouri answered, “Truth.”  
  
“I agree to the terms,” Castiel said with a nod. “Let’s do this.”  
  
The game began.  
  
Missouri was right - Castiel was good at this. In the first fifteen minutes of the game, he drank twice while Missouri drank four times and Chuck drank seven. Chuck wasn’t complaining, exactly - the upper middle shelf liquor Missouri provided tasted awesome, and it wasn’t like anything he was being asked was terribly private, anyway. Hell, they were with a psychic.   
  
“I’ve never wanted to quit college and become a hairdresser,” said Castiel.  
  
Crap. “I told you that in confidence!”  
  
While Castiel mostly picked on Chuck, Missouri took a broader approach.   
  
“I’ve never had my butt kicked by an angel.”  
  
Castiel and Chuck both cringed as they reached for their drinks.  
  
Chuck’s own “I’ve nevers” were way less effective, mostly because he was trying really hard not to use insider knowledge against his drinking companions. But after twenty minutes and twelve enthusiastic gulps of various alcohols, he stopped caring about cheating. Then it was time for the depressing personal revelations portion of the game.  
  
“I’ve never felt so abandoned by my family I wanted to die” and “I’ve never grown up without a real childhood to speak of” were his heavy hitters. “I’ve never felt inadequate in a relationship” would’ve been, too, except that Missouri accused him of lying and made him drink, too.   
  
Sometime after the half-hour mark, Castiel stopped making vaguely mopey faces at his glass of gin and tonic and decided to end Chuck’s reign of sadness.  
  
“I’ve never…” Castiel started, and gave him a shrewd look. “Been secretly turned on by my own psychic visions.”  
  
Chuck shot him a glare. He hadn’t expected Castiel to be the one to turn the game to Trivial Pursuit: Sexcapade Edition. Missouri laughed so loud it just about shook the table, but when Chuck ducked his head, trying to shove back all his most embarrassing sex memories so the psychic wouldn’t see, he caught her taking a stealthy drink.  
  
Oh, but two could play at this game.   
  
“I’ve never listened in complacently while my roommate had sex in the lower bunk,” Missouri said.   
  
Okay,  _three_  could play at this game. But Chuck had the trump card.   
  
“I’ve never put a penis in my mouth,” he declared, smacking his palm on the table.  
  
“You don’t have to sound so proud of yourself,” Missouri said as she drank her scotch.  
  
Chuck smiled to himself. He  _was_  proud of himself. Not for penis-in-mouth thing, because hey, he liked that combination of anatomy. No, he was proud of himself for what was about to come. He had a strategy. Castiel didn’t know what he’d wrought by summoning the sex topic, but oh, it was gonna be wroughten.   
  
Wroughted? Wreght? Whatever. Point being, Chuck had insider knowledge of Cas/Dean private time and a note somewhere in his old notebooks saying that Missouri had a pretty healthy view of sex, and there were a lot of places that penises could go. All he had to do was say, “I’ve never put a penis…” and he was golden.  
  
Fifty minutes into the game, Chuck was nearly done with his fourth drink and really glad he’d balanced out the hard stuff with beers. Missouri and Castiel were on their second and first drinks, respectively, and the penis strategy was well and truly, uh, blown. Missouri kept shooting him the kind of significant glances usually reserved for Peter Jackson movies, and something inside Chuck sank every time. He knew this was his fate: he was going to get sloppy drunk, take a leading question from Missouri, and wind up spilling the beans about Dean Winchester and the Chamber of Burgers.  
  
And then Castiel would hate him until his dying day, which would be…sometime soon. Too soon. Chuck’s stomach clenched. He slouched over his nearly empty glass, resting his head on his hand. God, this was going to suck. Maybe there was a way to keep Castiel out of it. Tie him up in a sigil-protected room. Pull 24/7 guard duty. Plead and beg with him to just stick around and watch the Syfy channel instead. There were  _Next Gen_  reruns on, for chrissakes. Chuck would be a crappy friend if he let the guy run off and get himself killed before he’d seen Captain Picard at the helm.  
  
“Chuck?”  
  
“Hm?” He raised his head, blinking blearily at Missouri.   
  
“Your turn.”  
  
“Oh.” He flattened his arms on the table and shook his head. “I dunno. I’ve never…I’ve never understood why, if there are other gods in the world, we have to deal with this stupid apocalypse instead of somebody else’s. I mean, flaming hail? What the crap is that?”  
  
He wasn’t sure if he’d expected Castiel to drink, but the former angel did anyway. Setting down his glass, he thought a moment and said, “Everyone wants to reach the end in their own way. Think of it this way. A child turns off the light. There is a monster under her bed, a monster in the closet, and a monster tapping at the window. Each wants to eat her and none wants to share. Whoever strikes first ends it - they all know it. When the angles drew first blood, they laid claim to this world’s end.” He swirled the dregs of his beer around in the bottle, watching the amber liquid glint in the lamp light, and swallowed the last of it. “Whatever the pantheon, whatever goodness shown to mankind, we—they—are all just things in the dark, waiting to draw first blood.”  
  
The kitchen went silent for a minute, the sounds of Lawrence nightlife filtering in through the windows: passing cars and the announcer of a baseball game over at the high school.   
  
Chuck shifted in his seat. “You gonna take your turn?”  
  
“Oh,” Castiel said. “Yes. I’ve never worn a sweater.”   
  
Missouri and Chuck both drank.  
  
Missouri slid her finger along the rim of her glass slowly, raising her eyes to meet Chuck’s. “I’ve never lied to my best friend.”  
  
Chuck swallowed hard. The room got narrow around him. He was about to actually do that nervous cartoon character thing and tug at his collar when Castiel leaned forward and grabbed a bottle to pour himself a shot.   
  
“Cas?”   
  
A faint blush rose to Castiel’s cheeks. “You once asked me if Dean and I had ever done anything on your cot.”   
  
“And you said—” Chuck pulled a face. “Dude!”  
  
“Sorry.” Castiel tossed back a shot and pinched the bridge of his nose as he swallowed.   
  
Chuck reached for the tequila. “Jesus,” he muttered, taking a long swig straight out of the bottle.   
  
“What about you?” Castiel said.  
  
“Nothing,” Chuck lied, his throat burning from more than the liquor. “I just—I just really need a drink.” He took another swig.  
  
Across the table, Missouri was shooting him about the most disappointed look he’d ever seen. It was like disappointing his mom. Or a golden retriever puppy. Or a mom-puppy hybrid with, like, psychic shame rays.   
  
Whoa. Good tequila.  
  
Chuck drank again for the new lie. He didn’t stop until he’d drained the bottle.  
  
***  
  
Oh holy merciful god, if there was such a thing - and he very much doubted it considering the state of life - his  _head_. Chuck’s fingers curled in his hair, his body pulled itself into a ball, and his skull heaved the mightiest throb of its long and storied career of hangovers. The squeak of sofa-bed springs underneath him cut through his ears like a shriek, and he groaned, curling his arms around his head.   
  
Another voice echoed his, and the bed shifted under him. Chuck blinked, taking a moment to assess where he was. Beige walls with cross-stitched plaques. Sofa-bed. Not drenched in cheap perfume. Okay, he probably hadn’t gotten drunk in a motel with a call girl.   
  
Missouri’s. He was at Missouri’s, in the den. Oh, god. He wasn’t in bed with—  
  
He pushed himself upright to look, his brain lurching. Oh, good. It was just Castiel. Innocent, slightly handsy Castiel, who had probably dragged Chuck’s drunk ass to bed to keep him from passing out on the kitchen floor. Chuck swallowed, remembering the last round of “I’ve Never” from the night before. He should’ve been left on the kitchen floor. He deserved to spend a night sleeping on cold tile - several nights, probably.   
  
“I’m gonna get some water,” he said, nudging the Castiel-shaped lump on the bed beside him. “Can I get you something?”  
  
“Nngh,” Castiel replied, face-down in the pillow. “Hrrnngghhrr.”  
  
“You’re luck I speak fluent hangover,” Chuck said, and pushed himself up off the bed. “One orange juice coming up—” He froze, swaying slightly. The back of his left hand was smudged red - and not just a little shaving mishap sized smudge but a whole swath of blood. Chuck checked his head and arms - the usual sites of his drunken injuries - but everything seemed to be intact.  
  
The bedsheets, on the other hand, would never be the same again. Blood stains streaked the sofa-bed from Chuck’s side of the mattress to Castiel’s side, where they were heaviest.   
  
“Cas,” Chuck said, shaking his friend’s shoulders.   
  
“Nrgle.”   
  
“Yes, now. It’s time to get up.” He pulled at Castiel’s left shoulder, rolling him onto his side, and sucked in a swear.   
  
The center of Castiel’s gray t-shirt was damp with blood, right in the spot where his grace had been ripped from him months ago. Castiel blinked blearily up at him, then down at his own chest, and said, “Oh.”   
  
“Oh? You’re bleeding from the chest, and all you have to say is ‘Oh’?”   
  
Castiel pulled the bedsheets up over his chest, looking like he’d been caught with his hand on Missouri’s cookie sheet again. “It’s nothing.”  
  
Chuck smacked him in the chest with a pillow, and Castiel gave a familiar grimace. “What’s going on? Is that—did your scar open up? Christ, Cas!”  
  
“It’s been undoing itself more every day that I’ve been away from Dean. I think it needs my residual grace energy off him to stay closed.” Castiel sighed, one hand curling against his chest. “I didn’t want you to—”  
  
“Worry? Well, I’m sure as hell worried now! Why didn’t you tell me?”  
  
“You were so busy with your visions—”  
  
“You should’ve just told me!”  
  
“I was going to!”  
  
“Oh yeah? When?”  
  
“I was going to make you an omelet and tell you!”   
  
A battering ram pounded against the door. Or maybe it was Missouri’s fist, but it sure as hell felt like a battering ram. “Boys!” she called, and opened the door enough to stick her face inside. She glared at Castiel and Chuck each in turn. “You get those dirty sheets off the bed - I’ll be back with bandages in a minute. And you get to the bathroom before you make yourself sick.”  
  
Chuck begrudgingly made his way to the door, grabbing the edge of the desk to steady himself when the floor spun. Missouri held the door open for him and shut it after him louder than was really necessary.  
  
“Ow.”  
  
“What is the matter with you?”  
  
Chuck winced. “Could you please be a little less loud?”  
  
“Oh, I’ll show you loud,” she said, louder. Grabbing him by the biceps, she marched him back through the house. She gave each footstep a specific, forceful  _thwap_  against the hardwood and dug a cup noisily out of the cupboards when they passed through the kitchen. The bathroom door slammed against the wall, and she shoved Chuck inside. He caught himself on the sink, his head pulsing.   
  
“Dammit, Chuck!” she yelled, and took a deep breath. Her volume came down, but so did her eyebrows. “Boy, I oughtta whup your ass. Did you lose the part of your brain that recognizes dumb, hypocritical bullcrap when it comes out of your mouth?”  
  
Chuck frowned, swallowing hard. “Hey, this is totally different from—”  
  
“Shut up. You come into my house, start keeping vital secrets, mainline my tequila, and start a shouting match in my den at nine a.m.?”  
  
“He started it.”  
  
“By holding in information that upsets you - stuff that has nothing to do with you, even! And you really think that you not telling him about Dean is going to have better results?”  
  
Chuck sat down on the lid of the toilet and crossed his arms, glaring at the tile.   
  
He could almost hear it when Missouri rolled her eyes. “As much as you might like to just build yourself a pillow fort and pretend all your problems away, you can’t.”  
  
“I didn’t say that.”  
  
“Do you know what the word ‘psychic’ means?”   
  
“I just—” Chuck dropped his head into his hands and massaged the aching bones under his eyebrows. His throat felt like he’d swallowed a tennis ball. He couldn’t get the words out.  
  
“You’re afraid he’ll pick Dean over you,” Missouri said for him, her voice softening. “You don’t want to lose him.”  
  
“He’s—” Chuck swallowed. It didn’t work.   
  
“The best friend you always wanted as a kid,” she finished, and chuckled. “Except that he’s not a dinosaur.”  
  
For a moment, it felt like that catalyzing emotional scene near the end of a movie, where the heroes finally understood each other and everybody united to face the common enemy.   
  
Then Missouri smacked him upside the head, making it ring like a gong.   
  
“Ow!”  
  
“You’re a moron, Chuck. He’s gonna find out, and the longer you wait to tell him, the worse it’s gonna be.” She slapped the cup down on the edge of the sink. “Have some water. I’m going to leave you in here to think about what you’ve done.” With that, she stepped out of the bathroom and slammed the door.  
  
Chuck stared at the backside of the door. “M—Missouri?” he called. “Did you just put me in time out?”  
  
She didn’t answer. Pans clanged in the kitchen, making his head hurt even worse - intentionally so, he suspected.  
  
“Balls.”   
  
***  
  
Chuck wrote the next chapter of  _The Dean & Anna Show_ crouched between the toilet and the bathtub. He didn’t have a pen or paper, so he scraped out each word on the knee of his jeans with the wrong end of his toothbrush.   
  
 _Dean had been through the green room’s supply of burgers twice, and he wasn’t full. Heaven’s food supply was like freaking Chinese food - not enough to keep him sated for more than an hour - and he had a sneaking suspicion it was low carb. But eating was about all he had left to do with it.  
  
He’d tried finger painting condiment sigils on the wall, but nothing he could remember well enough to paint helped. He’d dribbled ketchup coming from his mouth and nose and pretended to have hanged himself, but it didn’t trick Anna. He’d tried throwing burgers at her, but she only poofed herself out of the way. The burgers were, essentially, useless.  
  
“Why me?” Dean asked the next time Anna showed up. He was pacing again, seeing if he could slowly wear a hole in the floor that he could escape through. (It wouldn’t work, and he knew it, but pacing felt less pointless with that reasoning.)  
  
“Why you what?” Anna replied, still smiling that stupid pleasant smile at him.   
  
“Why’m I your go-to guy? You haven’t even told me what I’m supposed to do for you.”  
  
“Actually,” Anna said, picking up a virgin daiquiri from the bowl of ice on the table, “you’re not our go-to guy. That would be the Lamb.”  
  
Dean paused. “Is there a Sherry Lewis joke I’m missing here?”  
  
“Christ,” Anna explained, popping the top off the daiquiri and sipping from it. “AKA the Lamb, AKA son of God, AKA ‘Buddy’ - you know. Jesus. I don’t know if you’ve ever read the Bible.”   
  
“I’ve given the Gideons their money’s worth a few times.”   
  
“Then you might remember that Jesus is supposed to pull a deus ex machina on the End Times. In the written word, Jesus’s voice is the sword. He casts the Antichrist into the lake of fire and ends all war by just opening his mouth, reigns as King of Earth for a thousand years, yadda yadda, and then he casts Lucifer down into the lake of fire, too. The real version takes much less time, but y’know.” She shrugged. “He’s Heaven’s superstar. Our Gaga.”   
  
“Your what?”  
  
Anna gave him a pitying look. “You should really get rid of the cassettes.”  
  
“Not taking music advice from Heaven’s butt puppet, thanks.” Dean flattened his palms on the table and leaned across toward her. “So, Jesus saves and takes half damage. What does that have to do with me?”  
  
Anna took a swig of the virgin daiquiri. “He’s missing.”  
  
Dean smirked. “Did you look behind the couch?”  
  
“Y’know, Dean,” she said, and leaned across the table, her face inches from his, “you’re not nearly as funny as you think you are.”  
  
With a flutter of invisible wings, she left him alone in the room again. Dean swore._  
  
Chuck swore. The patch of denim over his knee was fuzzy from the wear of the toothbrush, and he’d been pressing it so hard into his knee that he could feel the flesh beneath it pulsing with a new bruise. It was definitely not an ideal substitute for proper writing implements - but it was better than letting a scene shove at the backs of his eyes with no way to let it out. Even with his inner eye blown wide open, he couldn’t get a damn thing out in any understandable order without the physical act of writing.   
  
Missouri let him out of the bathroom for breakfast but gave him the silent treatment. He sat across from her, thinking of the Nova specials from his childhood. In every ecosystem, there was some animal - usually a bug or something equally lame - that played dead to make predators lose interest. Chuck wondered if he feigned a stroke or something, if Missouri would stop giving him that  _look._  It was probably a bad idea, though - Castiel, who was very not a predator, would be freaked out if Chuck played dead. He’d probably try to revive him. There might be inexpertly attempted CPR. Bruised ribs, if he was lucky. Sloppy mouth-to-mouth if he wasn’t.   
  
Chuck slouched over his bowl. Okay, so playing dead wasn’t a sound option. But a nervous weight was growing in his stomach, as hard as the tile under his feet and as cold as Missouri’s glare across the oatmeal.   
  
She was right. She knew she was right. Chuck knew she was right. Castiel was the only one out of the loop.  
  
Crap.   
  
He was gonna have to tell him.  
  
Chuck eyed Castiel as he raised a spoonful of tasteless should-be-apple-cinnamon oatmeal to his mouth. His friend caught the look and gave him a confused little smile in return. It was just a sliver of a smile, but it extended to his eyes. A few months ago, before the archangel - before they’d been roommates in the panic room or drinking buddies or road trip companions or secret Ace of Base fans together - he’d never even seen Cas smile so brightly.  
  
Maybe…maybe tomorrow, he’d tell him. Or the day after that.   
  
***  
  
 _It was a demon named Crowley who suggested the detour. Sam hadn’t planned on stopping between LaCrosse and Lawrence, but once the suggestion was raised, the CB came alive with demonic whines.  
  
“Please, we’re sooo hungry!” and “I’m famished, Mr. Winchester!” and one “I could eat. Over.”   
  
“If this lot gets too hungry, they’ll just pull over to the side of the road and start eating babies,” Crowley drawled over the radio. “Do you want us to eat babies?”  
  
“Nobody’s going to eat any babies!” Sam said, resting his cheek on his hand as he drove. This was, so far, the worst road trip ever. What should be an easy half-day drive had turned into a ridiculously stretched out series of negotiations and car theft. And now, bellyaching demons. Peachy.  
  
“On the contrary, Sam,” crackled Crowley’s voice from the speaker, “there’s a very real danger of baby eating here. If a baby was looking at me right now with its keen little human eyes—well, personally, I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to resist devouring it.”  
  
Sam sighed. “Fine, we’ll stop. What’s the name of this place again?”  
  
The Norske Nook was nearly an hour out of the way, a quaint little Norwegian restaurant with cheerful decor and a staff wearing what looked to be traditional costumes. Sam and his eco-friendly demon army downright swarmed the place, overtaking every table except the one occupied by an elderly couple near the window. A pack of the demons crowded around the display case up front, ogling banana cream pies stacked as high as basketballs. He himself had been seated at the same table as the demon Crowley, who seemed to be wearing—actually, Sam couldn’t tell who he was wearing.  
  
“Literary agent,” Crowley clarified as he sugared his coffee. “Not literally braindead when I took charge, but they’re all dead on the inside, anyway.”  
  
Sam shot him a cross look.   
  
Crowley raised an eyebrow. “You’d think that was funny if you’d sealed a few dozen wannabe Hemmingways’ publishing deals with a kiss.”_  
  
Chuck snorted.   
  
 _“Anyway, fearless leader, what are we doing upon our triumphant return to Riverdale?”  
  
“I’m working on a plan.”  
  
“Are you?” The demon sounded amused. He stirred his coffee and licked the excess off his spoon, savoring it with an expression that belonged on either a sated predator or a connoisseur. “Does this plan involve losing?”  
  
“Excuse me?” Sam said, narrowing his eyes.   
  
“Los-ing,” Crowley enunciated. “The act of not winning - or, more specific to this case, the act of marching your ragtag army into Lucifer’s stronghold of the day and getting them and yourself ripped to bloody shreds. You hunters always need it spelled out for you, don’t you?”  
  
The waitress came around to their table, setting down two large slices of pie. Really large. The biggest Sam had ever seen, in fact. It almost distracted him from the way the demon had made his mouth hinge open.   
  
“Thanks, love,” Crowley said to the waitress, and dug into his - rhubarb. “You see, Sam,” he said between bites, “this is a doomed endeavor. Lucifer will dash us to the ground like rag dolls. We’re just your foot in the door. You need to think of a real plan - a twist he’ll never see coming, something that won’t end this on Heaven’s terms either. What’s your trump card?”  
  
“Uh,” Sam said, and shook his head. “Well, we’ve got the prophet.”  
  
Crowley chewed a hunk of pie, throwing him a deeply disdainful look. “I’m shaking in my immaculately shined eel skin boots. You’re going to have to think harder than that if you want to win this.”  
  
Sam snuck a peek under the table to see what eel skin shoes looked like. “If we’re so doomed, why are you on our side?”  
  
The demon smirked. “I’ve got a bad habit of betting on the underdogs.”  
  
Sam smiled. So the guy did think they had a chance - it wasn’t entirely hopeless. He took a bite of his pie and closed his eyes, allowing himself a few seconds of quiet brain time to savor it. Dean would love this place. The two of them would have to come here sometime.  
  
They’d have to come here sometime. That was the first time Sam could remember thinking forward to a time after this apocalypse business was over. He locked onto the thought and built a little wall around it in his mind, keeping it safe.  
  
On the way out of the restaurant, Sam stopped at the counter and bought a to-go slice from one of the basketball-sized pies in the display. He’d give it to Dean when they met up again in Lawrence. And after all this was over, they’d come here sometime and drink coffee and eat pies too tall for their forks and talk about that crazy time they killed the devil together._  
  
Oh god. He was crying. He was genuinely hunched over his laptop, typing and crying like an over-invested teenage writer. The pie, and—and the guilt. God, the guilt. Chuck had never associated pie with guilt before, but apparently pie was the perfect conveyance mechanism for guilt, because his insides were one big knot of OhgodwhatamIdoing. Sam was going to get here - and soon - and when he did and found no Dean…  
  
And when he and Castiel realized why there was no Dean…  
  
And when they figured out who was responsible for them not having known before why there wasn’t any Dean—Christ. If rays of concentrated disappointment could be used as weapons, they’d probably be able to defeat Lucifer with the power of Missouri, Sam, and Castiel’s combined. He didn’t know if he could take that.  
  
And worse, he didn’t know if Castiel could take it. Castiel had defended Chuck to the Winchesters time and time again. To find out he’d lied, and in front of Sam—   
  
“Chuck?”  
  
Chuck’s throat constricted. He saved the Google Doc and shut the laptop. “Yeah?”  
  
“Can I come in?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
Castiel parted the bed sheet curtains over the entrance of the pillow fort and knelt to crawl inside. It was a pretty majestic fort, if Chuck did say so himself. Combining two hours of manpower, pillows from three couches, and 80’s cartoon bedsheets from a trunk in Missouri’s guest bedroom, the pillow fort spanned the length and width of the sofa-bed in the den, its bed sheet roof hanging like a tent from a flower pot hook on the ceiling. In a weird way, hiding in the fort to write down his visions made Chuck feel safer. It was his pillow kingdom, a fluffy, springy land where nothing could go wrong.   
  
Castiel took a seat beside Chuck on the sofa-bed and eyed the roof of the fort. “Are you going to leave this up overnight?”  
  
Chuck hugged the laptop to his knees. “I was thinking about it, yeah.”  
  
“I’ve never slept in a fort before.” Castiel narrowed his eyes. “I spent the night in Housesteads once, in the second century. But I had no need for sleep at the time.”  
  
Chuck leaned back against the couch cushion that made up the south wall, his throat so tight it was getting hard to breathe. This was his pillow kingdom, and nothing could go wrong…without his permission. Dammit. “Castiel…I, uh. I gotta tell you something.”  
  
“I can sleep on the floor if you prefer. I don’t mind.”  
  
“No, it’s not that. It’s—” Chuck tried to get out the words  _Dean got captured by Heaven and I didn’t tell you,_  but they wouldn’t go. He tried again, failed, clamped his mouth shut, and opened the Google Document containing the most recent string of Dean-based visions. His hands shook as he handed the laptop to his friend.  
  
Castiel read for a moment, then his eyebrows lowered and he glanced up at Chuck. Back to reading. More eyebrow lowering. He read quickly, his eyes zipping along the text and his thumb clicking to scroll down. Chuck couldn’t see from this angle how far he’d read when he stopped, but it had to be at least three scenes.   
  
“This is—”   
  
“Visions, yeah,” Chuck answered. The next words tumbled out like they’d been shoved. “About a week’s worth.”   
  
“You’ve…” Castiel started, and trailed off.   
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Castiel’s expression went cold. “A week?”  
  
“Please don’t rush into some sort of half-cocked rescue mission.”  
  
“You’ve known for a week, and you said nothing.”  
  
“I—” Chuck swallowed hard and shook his head. “Look, Cas, before we left, I promised Dean I wouldn’t let you pull any heroics - to keep you from getting yourself hurt, or worse. He wouldn’t’ve wanted me to tell you!”  
  
“ _He_  wouldn’t want you to? What about what I want?  _I’m_  your friend.” Castiel shoved the laptop back at him, sending a stack of throw pillows cascading down the side of the fort. “What about the Bro Code, Chuck? Dean is ‘my ho in this context,’ and you put him before me?”   
  
“I saw you die!” Chuck cried. “I—I  _felt_  you die! When Missouri was trying to teach me to open my inner eye - I went searching for the intersection of you, Heaven, and Lucifer’s end of the world, and what I found was pain and you dying. Cas…I can’t let that happen to you.”  
  
Castiel froze. His face hardened, his mouth setting in a thin line and his eyes somewhere else. “It’s the end of the world,” he said simply. “If I die helping Dean saving the world, my life will be well spent.”  
  
“Don’t give me that crap! You’re just as eager to not be dead as I am!”  
  
Castiel didn’t answer, just started out of the pillow fort, his eyes shadowed.  
  
Chuck reached out and grabbed his wrist. “Dude, I saved your life. I sacrificed myself for you! Doesn’t that mean anything?”  
  
Castiel’s face tightened, and for a moment he looked back, but he didn’t look Chuck in the eyes. “I am grateful,” he said, his voice small. “I tried to show how grateful. I watched over you. I got you a Coke. But in the end times, life-debts are small currency. We all die soon. Dying a little earlier for someone else doesn’t mean much.”  
  
“It damn well meant something to me!” Chuck said. “I like being alive!”  
  
“Then maybe you should act like it sometime!” Castiel hissed back at him, his features going sharp with anger. “You’re so miserable most of the time, Chuck, sometimes I think you gave your life just because it seemed like an interesting plot twist!”  
  
Chuck’s heart rose into his throat. “You’re not just ungrateful, you know that? You’re selfish! You’re so stuck on Dean, Dean, Dean that you’d throw anything else away just to have another seven minutes in heaven with him in the back of a van in Bobby’s scrapyard. You’d throw your life away for him, too blinded by your own love to even see that this thing with him isn’t going to last!”  
  
Castiel’s face slackened for a moment, and he said, “Did you see that in a vision?”  
  
“No,” Chuck said. “I don’t need to - I’ve written him for years. He’ll never settle down, especially not with some broken supernatural thing. Did you even think about what happens to you when he leaves you?”  
  
Castiel scowled, finally yanking his arm away. He looked Chuck dead in the eyes and said, “At least I’m not afraid to be happy.”  
  
Chuck watched Castiel walk away through the slit between the couch arm and the paisley bedsheet. “Oh—oh yeah?” he called. “If I’m so afraid to be happy, then why do I keep you around? You’re a freaking ball of sunshine!”   
  
Castiel didn’t respond. Chuck shoved his head under a pillow, wishing he was anywhere else. Maybe Housesteads was nice this time of year.  
  
*   
  
When he emerged from under the pillow, his eyes still prickling but the knots inside him a little looser, Chuck heard voices outside. He crept out of the pillow fort and leaned toward the half-open door. From here, he could just make out the curve of Castiel’s shoulder in the kitchen doorway.  
  
“And about damn time he worked up the nerve,” Missouri was saying.   
  
“You knew—” Castiel’s voice still came off cold. “Of course you knew. Everyone here knew but me.”  
  
“As the only non-psychic type in the house, I should think that wouldn’t be a source of angst for you,” Missouri said. “Anyway, we’re going out for dinner. Your friend’s been putting out a craving for curly fries so big he passed it on to me.”   
  
“I’m not sure he is my friend,” Castiel responded under his breath, like he was afraid to say the words too loudly.  
  
Chuck swallowed.  
  
“Oh, Cas.” Missouri tutted. “Hon, you wouldn’t be in this mess if he wasn’t your friend. He was trying to protect you - in an ass-backwards, drunken idiot sort of way. He meant well.”  
  
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  
  
“I suppose you would know.” Over Castiel’s shoulder, Chuck saw her looking the guy up and down. “You’re not going to ditch us to try and save your boyfriend.” It wasn’t a question. Castiel leaned heavily against the door frame, his head sliding into view as he shook it. “No. You’re smarter than that. Well, you don’t have to come with us if you don’t want - just don’t stand around here brooding in my kitchen, all right?”  
  
“Yes, ma’am.”  
  
Missouri patted him on the arm with a tentative hand, then glanced over her shoulder, straight into Chuck’s eyes. “Come on, Chuck, let’s try and make it before the dinner rush.”  
  
As Chuck slunk out of the den, Castiel looked over at him. He kept his eyes on the floorboards, grabbed his keys, and headed out to the station wagon before anyone could get another word in about what a screw-up he was.   
  
The sigils painted on the roof of his car, it turned out, were a perfect match for the smells of the KFC buffet. It made Chuck think of road trip sing-alongs, which made him wish he’d bought a combo meal instead. He selected a handful of biscuits and one lonely little drumstick, trying to balance out the smells better, and spent the next ten minutes picking idly at the skin on the drumstick across from Missouri in a booth.  
  
“Stop it,” she said finally.  
  
“Stop what?”  
  
“Moping.”  
  
“I’m not moping. I’m eating pensively.”  
  
“He’s not going anywhere.”  
  
“Are you sure?”  
  
“Honey, I saw straight through him. He’s pissed at you, and he’s confused, but he cares about you - as much as he cares for Dean. He may be stupid for that boy, but he’s equally stupid for you.” Missouri tapped Chuck on the hand with her spork. “Castiel chose you and safety over Dean and capture. Stop complaining and eat your curly fries.”  
  
Chuck tried to let out the breath he’d been holding, but it wouldn’t go all the way. Something in his throat had gone tight again, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that something awful was happening. “I’m gonna go grab some more ketchup,” he told Missouri, and pushed his chair back.   
  
At the other end of the restaurant, between the drink dispenser and the bucket of ketchup packets, Chuck pulled out a napkin and stretched it across the counter. Glancing back at the table to be sure Missouri wasn’t watching, he took a ballpoint pen from his pocket, hit the “Castiel” switch in his brain, and put pen to napkin.  
  
 _Castiel walked the length of the house, running his fingers along the smooth surface of walls and wood finish and trying to delight in the sheer sensation of it. But after today’s revelation, feeling just didn’t pack the same punch.  
  
Revelation. A bitter laugh escaped his lips. He remembered being an angel, feeling the power of the divine emanating from his vessel like heat from a car left out in the sun. He remembered standing with his brothers and sisters against evil, having a purpose. And he remembered taking revelation. It meant largely the same thing then as it did right now - word from above. From a higher angel or from the prophet, it didn’t matter.   
  
What mattered was that now, the news came without orders. His actions were his own to decide. And he had decided to take Missouri’s advice and stay, because it would be foolish to do the other thing - the thing that made his heart thunder in his chest whenever he thought of it.  
  
His bare toe slammed into the lip between the floorboards of the back hallway and the tile of the bathroom, and he lurched forward, gripping the rim of the bathroom sink to steady himself. He sucked in his breath and lifted his foot off the ground, curling his toe as it throbbed. Feeling was overrated.  
  
In the mirror over the sink, Castiel’s face - the face he’d appropriated from a devout family man - reflected pain and consternation. That expression didn’t seem sufficient. He tried swearing, and that helped a little.  
  
In the mirror, Castiel noticed a dark smudge on his t-shirt. He peeled the shirt up to his collarbone to study the wound. Even in the half-darkened room, he could see the outline of the place his grace had been ripped from clearly, a red rim seeping through the bandages. He felt it, too, stretching deeper into his body as the wound unmended itself.   
  
How long would it be before the hole in him ate into the vital systems of this body? Would it kill him? He knew he could die. And he knew that death meant no more feelings at all - not pain and consternation, nor stubbed toes, nor the soft crush of stubble against his cheek as Dean kissed him goodnight.  
  
Castiel swallowed. He knew also that he would die - whether by this, at the hands of the Lucifer in a holy vision, some long, drawn-out disease he contracted on vacation - he would absolutely die. Even movies confirmed it.  
  
What mattered was that now, he was human. His actions were his own to decide. And humans changed their minds all the time.   
  
He grabbed a butcher knife from the block in the kitchen, flung open the pantry door, and made a long slash down the center of the protective sigil there, severing its power._  
  
“MISSOURI!” Chuck yelled, sprinting across the restaurant. The dinner rush crowd gave him an assortment of bewildered and judgmental looks, but he didn’t care. By the time he reached the booth, Missouri had gotten some sort of mental image off him and was rising from her seat, her eyes wide.   
  
Chuck hadn’t driven the station wagon this fast since that time he’d tried to drag race a friend in college. Then, it had ended in a dented fender and a sixer of Bud Lights sacrificed on the pavement. This time, it ended with a near miss of a mailbox and a squeal of tires as Chuck floored the brakes in front of Missouri’s house.   
  
Castiel was standing on the front lawn.   
  
Chuck threw the station wagon into park and opened his door.  
  
“Chuck, no!” Missouri said, grabbing for his wrist. “He’s already called for her. It’s too late. Get back in here where it’s protected!”  
  
The streetlight at the foot of the driveway blew, raining down sparks in the dim light.   
  
“Cas,” said a cool voice. The hairs on the back of Chuck’s neck prickled. He turned, feeling like it must be in slow-mo. Anna stood in the street, facing Castiel. “I’m glad you summoned me.”  
  
Castiel stepped toward her, his hands balling into fists at his sides. “I want to make a deal with you. My freedom for Dean’s.”   
  
“Cas, don’t—” Chuck started, but Missouri pulled him hard into his seat.   
  
“You want to hand her the prophet?” she hissed.  
  
“I can’t make that trade,” Anna said, stepping forward. Just in front of the station wagon, she paused mid-stride. Her gaze wandered across its hood as if seeing right through it, and she furrowed her brow. “You have friends here. Protected. That’s really clever, Cas. What kind of sigils did you use, Enochian?”  
  
“With the company I’ve kept, I know what your opposition is planning,” Castiel offered. “I can be of use to you - more so than Dean.”  
  
“Afraid not,” Anna said. A smile curled across her lips as she took another step toward the station wagon. Her knee touched the bumper, and she laid a hand flat on the hood, as if feeling it out blindly. “I wonder how useful your friends might be, though…” Her fingers trailed along the line of the hood, moving toward Chuck’s half-open door. They reached the window before Castiel’s voice cut through the quiet of the neighborhood.  
  
“Will you promise not to hurt them?”  
  
Anna’s head snapped up. “What was that?”  
  
Castiel swallowed, looking to Chuck, then back to Anna. “If I surrender and return with you, will you promise not to hurt the people in that car?”  
  
Anna’s hand dropped, and she nodded. “I swear to our Father.”  
  
“No,” Chuck hissed through his teeth, and Missouri clamped a hand over his mouth.  
  
“And you won’t come back for them once you’ve got me.”  
  
The angel thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Deal.” She reached a hand out toward him.   
  
Castiel hesitated a moment, then strode over to Anna. She rested her first two fingers on his forehead, and with a crackle of electricity and a muted flash of light, the two disappeared.   
  
“NO!” Chuck yelled, breaking out of Missouri’s grasp. He pitched himself out of the car, scrambled to the patch of lawn that had just housed his friend, and stood for a moment, surveying the ground like maybe this was just a joke or some kind of  _Honey, We Shrunk the Fallen Angel_  outtake. Nothing.  
  
“Come on,” Missouri called, headed toward the house, “we’ve gotta get those wards back up before something else finds its way here!”  
  
“But Castiel—”  
  
“He’s gone, Chuck!”  
  
Gone. Castiel was—no. Not here, maybe, but he wasn’t just  _gone_  in the euphemistic sense of the word. Hell, he didn’t even know if Anna had taken Castiel to Heaven’s green room - maybe he’d gotten away. Maybe he’d fought her off. Maybe he’d—  
  
“Chuck, get your ass inside!”  
  
The protective wards. Chuck sprinted toward the door, slipped on the grass, and landed hard, scraping the crap out of his palms on the front walk. Missouri beat him to the front door, and the heels of her Mary Janes clacked out a frenzied rhythm on the hardwood floors as she rushed to the kitchen.   
  
“My pantry! Goddammit, Castiel!”  
  
Chuck stopped in the living room to catch his breath. Waffles and KFC were definitely not as good for his health as Bobby’s apocalypse rations. “The oil’s in the—”  
  
“Got it,” Missouri called back.  
  
“You need me to—?”  
  
“Nope.” She was already filling in the gaps in the sigil, her fingers working the holy oil mixture into the grooves carved in the pantry. The destruction that had taken Castiel an hour of introspection and internal argument to work up to took just a few seconds to fix - at least in terms of the sigil. The door would never be the same. The air seemed to shift as her fingers crossed the last gap, suddenly more breathable and less like a vise around Chuck’s head. “Done!”  
  
“Damn, you’re f—” Chuck started, and froze.  
  
There were fingers curling around the side of the couch. Unaccounted for, definitely-not-his, fingers.  
  
“M—Missouri?”  
  
The psychic stormed back into the room, her hands making threatening motions in front of her. “That idiot of an angel had better not get himself killed in Heaven, because I’m looking forward to killing him myself. That door was original to the house!”  
  
“Missouri?”  
  
“What!”  
  
Chuck pointed. Her eyebrows rose. She inched around the couch, and Chuck followed.  
  
“Jesus Christ,” Missouri breathed.  
  
There, coiled in the gap between the radiator and the back of the couch, was Jesus Christ.   
  
Chuck recognized him immediately, although he couldn’t quite place why. The guy wasn’t like the images on the pamphlets Chuck’s mother pointedly left in his coat pocket at family dinners - no, this Jesus seemed small and starved, staring up at them from under a mess of dark curls. His skin looked like he’d been wandering a desert for years. His mouth was clamped shut, but Chuck didn’t need voice recognition; he felt somewhere inside - somewhere adjacent to his switchboard - that this was the Lamb missing from Heaven.  
  
Christ—uh, literally—he couldn’t deal with this right now.  
  
Missouri knelt next to the couch, reaching out a hand. Jesus flinched away. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said gently, “it’s okay. You’re safe here.” The guy relaxed visibly, but still clung to the radiator.   
  
“Crap,” Chuck muttered, backing away. “I can’t—this is too weird.”   
  
“Chuck—” Missouri started, but he’d already scrambled into the den. He heard her saying something about proper treatment of guests as the door slammed.   
  
Chuck’s chest was tightening up, and he felt his thoughts beginning to swim. He braced himself against the arm of the fold-out couch, trying to slow down his breathing. If Castiel were here, he’d offer to grab him a paper bag to breathe into. But Castiel wasn’t here. Castiel was—where?  
  
Castiel.   
  
Chuck dove into the pillow fort. Cracking open the ancient laptop, he flipped the mental switch for Castiel and put his fingers to the keys.   
  
Please be okay, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut as his fingers started typing. Fight her off. Get Dean and blaze.  
  
 _Anna might look like a little slip of a thing, but she threw like an archangel. Castiel’s shoulder hit the marble floor of the green room, and his vision exploded with sparks. The landing jarred his ribcage, making the wound in his chest pulse with pain. He gritted his teeth and squinted his eyes closed, his hand rising instinctively to his chest. The front of his shirt had already started to bleed through.  
  
“Cas?” Well-worn boot treads squeaked against the marble, and a body dropped to the floor beside him. Familiar hands met his cheeks.   
  
Castiel peeled his eyes open. Dean’s face hovered about a foot above his, concern written in his dusty green eyes. Castiel grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him down into a kiss.   
  
The pain in his chest waned the moment Dean’s lips touched his, and he felt traces of his own grace within Dean surging between them. Castiel dug his fingers into Dean’s hair, feeling Dean’s weight press down against him. The wound stopped hurting, then tightened beneath his shirt as new skin began to grow across the raw patches.   
  
Anna cleared her throat conspicuously.   
  
Dean pulled back reluctantly, gazed into Castiel’s eyes with something like astonishment.   
  
“Hi,” Castiel said.   
  
“Hey,” Dean answered, starting to smile.  
  
“Get a room, boys,” Anna said, rolling her eyes.  
  
“We would if you’d show us the exit to this one,” Dean shot back.   
  
“Not until Lucifer’s up to bat,” Anna said.   
  
Dean got to his feet, pulling Castiel up with him. “I told you, I’m not gonna fight the devil for you dicks.”  
  
Anna plucked a virgin daiquiri from the bowl of chilled drinks on the table and tossed it to Castiel. “You will,” she said, giving Dean a sly look. “Or Cas will be the first of our ranks to be thrown in Lucifer’s path. If you think we’re dicks, just wait until you see the video feed of how he treats those who get in his way.”   
  
On that note, Anna gave them both a cheerful nod and disappeared with a flutter of feathers._  
  
No, no, no, no no no!   
  
Chuck grabbed the nearest pillow and hurled it across the room, biting back a yell. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Not with Sam and his eco-friendly demon army about to ride in like the freaking riders of Rohan -  _finally_  - and Chuck starting to steer his visions, and—and whatever the crap was going on with Jesus in the living room.   
  
This wasn’t—it wasn’t how things were supposed to end between him and Castiel. Death in battle, maybe - not a fight that was his own stupid fault. Although, Chuck admitted to himself with a grimace, if anyone was gonna screw things up this badly, it had to be him. He grabbed another pillow to throw and froze. A smudge of Castiel’s blood stood out against the beige paisley pattern of the pillowcase. Chuck slouched, dropping the pillow to the mattress beside him, and drew a hand down across his face.   
  
The heroes were scattered. Out there in the living room were some kind of freaking messiah and a one pissed off psychic. He’d broken his own code like a total hypocrite. His best friend had chosen to get himself imprisoned in Heaven’s green room. This whole stupid, backwards life he’d built in the midst of the apocalypse was crashing down around his ears, and yet, all Chuck could think was:  
  
Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy.  
  
GodDAMMIT.  
  



End file.
